Intel has announced its new Intel Arc brand for discrete high-performance consumer GPUs, as well as associated software and services, largely aimed at gamers. The first models for both desktops and laptops will be launched in 2022. In addition, the company has unveiled the first of its genre-themed codenames referring to upcoming products. Formerly known as DG2, ‘Alchemist’ is based on the Xe HPG architecture and will be launched in early 2022. The series will run alphabetically, with Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid to follow. The company is launching a marketing campaign with promotional videos, sneak peeks and branded items available through Intel’s website.
Intel has previously confirmed that Xe will support HPG hardware ray tracing and GDDR6 memory. GPUs are manufactured by an outside foundry. The new promo videos show demonstrations of variable speed shading, mesh shading, video upscaling and AI accelerated game supersampling. Gameplay demos included Forza Horizon 4, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), Psychonauts 2, Riftbreaker, Crysis Remastered, Metro Exodus, although details of the test environment and settings used were not immediately available.
Intel has been working on graphics for a number of years and had previously promised to ship discrete GPUs by 2020. It will compete against Nvidia and AMD, which have been a duopoly until now, although the GPU market has recently been driven by massive demand from cryptocurrency miners, as well as a global shortage of microprocessor manufacturing, pushing prices up. No specs or pricing has yet been announced, nor is it known yet how many models there will be in each generation, or which segments of gamers Intel will target. Intel has also not yet named any retail graphics card suppliers or OEM brands that will ship laptops and PCs with these GPUs.
The company hired AMD’s former graphics head Radeon Raja Koduri and several other high-profile industry names. The Xe architecture and branding are intended to scale directly from integrated GPUs to data centers and high-performance exascale computing deployments.
At CES 2020, Intel showed its DG1 demo card, which was distributed only to developers. The Iris Xe Max discrete GPU for notebooks was launched in late 2020 and the Xe architecture has also been used for integrated GPUs in some recent Intel Core CPUs.
Intel recognizes that there are more than three billion gamers worldwide, many of whom are also power users, content creators and multitaskers. More than a billion hours of game content was published on YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and other platforms, and more than 28 billion hours of that were watched last year.
