Intel presents a name for its upcoming consumer video cards. According to the manufacturer, these are high-end chips for both desktops and laptops and will be released in the first quarter of 2022 under the name Intel Arc.
The first Intel Arc products are based on GPUs codenamed Alchemist, Intel writes. This concerns the GPU that was previously known as the DG2 and is based on Intel’s Xe HPG architecture. There will be variants for laptops and desktops, and Intel promises “smooth frame rates” in games.
In a promotional video, the company shows games such as Forza Horizon 4, PUBG, Metro Exodus and Days Gone, which would run on a pre-production version of an Intel Arc GPU. However, Intel does not show details about the settings used and does not show frame rates.
The video also confirms that Intel is working on its own alternative to Nvidia’s DLSS. Intel calls this AI-accelerated super sampling. In the promotional video, Intel claims to upscale a 480p resolution to 4k, but nothing can be said about the quality because the video does not have a 4k resolution.
Intel Arc will span multiple generations of GPUs. Future generations codenamed Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid are being worked on. Like Alchemist, those names come from Dungeons & Dragons.
At the beginning of this year, information came out about the DG2 GPUs, which are now known as Alchemists. There are five variants with 96, 128, 256, 384 or 512 execution units and there is support for 4GB to 16GB of GDDR6 memory, with speeds from 14Gbit/s to 18Gbit/s. In comparison, the most powerful integrated Xe GPU of a Tiger Lake processor has 96 EUs. The information dates from the end of 2020. It is not known whether changes have been made in the meantime.
Intel has not yet publicly provided detailed details about its consumer GPUs. A year ago, Intel said that video cards based on the Xe HPG architecture would appear in 2021. That has therefore been postponed to early 2022.
Intel Arc chips