Yesterday, Intel announced that it would be launching its new high-end consumer GPU lineup — that it’s calling Arc — to the market early next year. The new brand will encompass both the software behind the cards and the physical cards themselves. The chipmaker will be bringing the first of multiple generations to market in Q1 of 2022, codenamed ‘Alchemist’. Future generations under the codenames Battlemage, Celestial and Druid will follow.
Intel vs AMD vs Nvidia
Previously known as DG2, the Alchemist arc-based GPUs will come in both desktop and notebook flavours. It looks like Intel wants to bring the flight to both AMD and Nvidia. If that means we see lower prices for the existing cards on the market, then we’re all for it.
Intel didn’t reveal much about any specifications or any performance-related info, but they did release a promo video showing a pre-production prototype playing Psychonauts 2, Metro Exodus and the Crysis Remastered Trilogy.
Here's a sneak peek of pre-production Intel Arc graphics in action. https://t.co/VOMsMN6r2y #IntelArc pic.twitter.com/b9fOsXdRCq
— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) August 16, 2021
If Intel isn’t stretching the truth about what its new GPUs can do then, according to the marketing material, the cards will support mesh shading, variable-rate shading, video upscaling, and real-time ray tracing.
Interestingly, Intel also wants to compete on the AI-powered supersampling front as well. It will bring its own version of the technology to compete against Nvidia’s Deep Learning Supersampling (DLSS and AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR).
The whole point of supersampling is to render games at a lower resolution and then upscale them to provide smoother framerates without losing any image quality.
At the beginning of the year, Intel released its first Iris Xe graphics cards. These low-powered cards weren’t marketed towards dedicated gaming PCs, but to prebuilt desktop PCs and workstations to broaden the display capabilities and provide multimonitor support.
Here’s to hoping that the new range of gaming graphics cards will provide enough of a stir to shake things up. We haven’t had a good shakeup in a while. That’s if they can produce enough of the damn things.