Intel decided to intervene in the battle of gaming graphics cards with Arc

Intel has announced its upcoming GPUs that will ship under the Intel Arc brand. The new brand will cover not only hardware, but also software - these will be powerful discrete graphics cards of several generations. The first of these, formerly known as DG2, is expected to arrive, codenamed Alchemist, in the first quarter of 2022.

Arc-based Alchemist GPUs will be available for desktops and laptops. It looks like Intel is serious about competing with industry giants like AMD and Nvidia. Despite the fact that at the moment almost nothing is known about the performance of the first Intel GPUs, today the company published a teaser in which it showed the smooth operation of PUBG, Psychonauts 2, Metro Exodus and other games.

Arc graphics cards will support Mesh Shading, Variable rate shading (VRS), scaling and ray tracing (RTX). It is important that Intel also promises hardware AI acceleration, which means that developers have their own answer to Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technologies. In June, AMD also introduced its own version of DLSS - FidelityFX Super Resolution technology, which uses spatial instead of AI-based temporal scaling. The main task of all these technologies is to improve the quality of games by scaling images from a lower resolution, which will provide a smooth frame rate without noticeable damage to the main images.

Intel also listed the codenames for other cards in the Arc series - Battlemage, Celestial and Druid. More details and official announcements are planned for the end of 2021.

It is worth noting that the creation of video cards is not new for Intel. The company previously launched Iris Xe GPUs that use the Xe LP architecture. These are low power cards that weren't designed for gaming PCs. The new Intel Arc GPUs will be based on Xe-HPG technology, which is related to HP's Xe-LP microarchitectures. and HPC.