Published , by Chris Jarrard
Published , by Chris Jarrard
While there have been rumblings, rumors, and leaks over the last 24 months that Intel was hard at work preparing its own discrete graphics solution targeted at the consumer market, we had no official word directly from the horse’s mouth. Today, Intel formally announced Arc, its new graphics accelerator brand. Unlike the integrated graphics processors found in its CPUs, Arc GPUs are designed for high-performance gaming. The first of these new graphics cards is expected to debut in Q1 2022 under the codename Alchemist.
Prior to today’s formal announcement, the graphics architecture that will arrive with Alchemist has previously been known as DG2. The GPUs built on this architecture will be available in both laptop and desktop variants, with Intel promising to compete with existing gaming GPU leaders AMD and NVIDIA.
Intel also provided a hype video to go along with today’s announcement that you can see in the embed above. The clip features an assortment of PC games that are said to be running directly on Arc hardware. Each of the games shown is known to be rather hardware intensive and running smoothly at settings that appear to be set as high as possible or somewhere in the neighborhood.
At the end of the clip, we see what appears to be a real-time demo made for the Intel silicon that depicts some sort of robotic figure slumped in a pile of trash and then standing in front of heavy equipment. The clip appears to be using ray-traced reflections and other high-end features. If Intel is set on making a dent in the discrete GPU market, it would seem that they came prepared to play.
We’ll know more about the new Arc graphics lineup, including information on specific SKUs, memory configuration, power consumption, and more as the teased Q1 2022 release window draws closer.