Daily Authority: Intel takes on GPU kings 👑

Intel Arc is the newly announced brand name for Intel’s upcoming high-end graphics chips. Arc is fine and all as it competes with Nvidia’s Geforce line and AMD Radeon’s GPUs for a lucrative slice of the discrete GPU market.

What’s more fun than Arc are the code names Intel will use for its generations of Arc GPUs: The first generation Intel Arc chips formerly known as DG2 are officially codenamed Alchemist.

Future arc chips will be known by the code names Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid, which is fun.
And that’s also an indication from Intel that it is committed to the market.

Intel’s GPUs can actually be solid:

First, Intel isn’t starting from scratch or a full first-generation approach – it has had built-in GPUs for ages, and its 11th generation cores were able to play decent high-level games without a separate GPU.
There is also software know-how, with Intel releasing drivers for games with performance enhancements, as AMD and Nvidia have been doing for some time.
Intel’s Xe-HPG micro-architecture is used to power Intel’s high-end performance graphics chips for gamers and cryptominers.
They will also support features such as “hardware-based ray tracing and artificial intelligence-driven super-sampling” to compete with Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FidelityFX upscaling. The chips will also fully support Microsoft’s DirectX 12, all fancy functions are included.
You may have seen a DG2 name for it in the past: this was a tentative name as it was in some ways a continuation of something Intel released only for system manufacturers called DG1.
Alchemist’s launch will be a range of graphics cards, likely split between desktop performance and low-power mobility options, RAM configurations, and cores. In short, no data sheets are available yet.
Intel has also released a trailer showing some recent PC games running on pre-production Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs.

The problem:

Gamers and PC makers need these GPUs now. It’s still hard to find even less powerful cards out there, let alone something like an Nvidia RTX 3090 or AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT.
And if you want to play on PS5 or Xbox Series X, you will struggle to find one, too.
Intel is reportedly relying on TSMC’s 7nm process, it seems like its offering is limited, and Intel said it will be a “first quarter 2022” release.
I doubt the first quarter of 2022 will see an end to the cycle of bottlenecks, but having more from Intel now might have helped …

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