Intel’s plan for new high-performance graphics: everything we know
TL; DR
- Intel Arc is the newly announced brand name for the upcoming high-end graphics chips from Intel.
- With the code name Alchemist, the first chips of this type in PC desktops and laptops are to be delivered in the first quarter of 2022.
- Intel Arc GPUs will compete against Nvidia’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon products.
- Intel has also released a trailer showing games running on preproduction Arc GPUs.
For years, Intel has been teasing us about its intention to compete with Nvidia and AMD in the high-end PC graphics chip business. Today the company revealed a few more pieces of the puzzle.
The chip maker announced that its high-end GPUs will use the Intel Arc brand name. It also gave the code names known for several generations of its arc chips. Formerly known as DG2, the first generation of Intel Arc chips are officially codenamed Alchemist. Future arc chips will be known by the code names Battlemage, Celestial and Druid.
We don’t yet have a lot of key information about Arc, such as game frame rates, power consumption, and prices. Fortunately, we know a little. The first generation arc chips will be Intel’s X. usee HPG microarchitecture. Accordingly PC playerHardware spec rumors say it will target the performance of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070 GPU.
Intel has confirmed that the first generation arc chips will support functions such as “hardware-based ray tracing and artificial intelligence-driven super-sampling”. The chips will also fully support Microsoft’s DirectX 12 Ultimate API.
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The first chips will be available in PC desktops and notebooks sometime in the first quarter of 2022.
Yes, it can run Crysis
The company also released a trailer showing some recent PC games running on pre-production Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs. The trailer shows brief glimpses of footage from Forza Horizon 4, PUBG, Metro Exodus, and a few others. It even shows footage from the Crysis Remastered Trilogy and answers the question of whether Intel Arc chips can actually run Crysis (an early PC gaming meme).
Intel says we can expect more information on Arc and Alchemist later in 2021. It’s pretty obvious that Intel wants to be the high-end solution for gamers and creatives, but we’ll have to wait and see how it compares to Nvidia’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon graphics solutions.
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