Earlier last Fall, Intel announced it would be entering the GPU market, which has historically been dominated by both Nvidia and AMD. The Arc series is supposed to be a collection of gaming GPUs, software packages, and services meant to enhance the overall gaming experience. There’s even a line of merchandise associated with the forthcoming line of products. Now that we’re three months into the new year, Intel has finally settled on a release date through a brief Q&A with Lisa Pearce, the company’s VP and GM for the Visual Compute Group:
We are excited to begin launching our mobile family of Intel Arc A-series GPUs on March 30th and showcasing key technologies, like Intel® Deep Link, XeSS and more.
To be clear, this release date is slated for the Intel Arc A370M, a GPU intended for labtop-users and has been dubbed the Arc Alchemist — as pointed out by Input Mag, the graphics card is “based on the Ex HPG microarchitecture, which can be found on Intel’s first-generation dedicated GPU, the DG1, a low-budget option found only in pre-built PCs.”
To commemorate the release, Intel will be hosting a digital showcase on March 30 to demonstrate the capabilities of its new graphics card.
Talking shop—
Pearce outlined that users can expect the new Arc labtop-GPUs to enable double the power in graphics performance when compared with integrated graphics alone. The company arrived at this number after comparing average FPS at 1080p Medium settings, within Metro Exodus (an apocalyptic FPS that was one of the first games to make use of real-time ray tracing and NVIDIA DLSS), against the Intel Xe architecture.
To put that in layman’s turn, Intel tested its Arc line by analyzing the frame rates achieved by 2019’s Metro Exodus, which makes use of Nvidia graphic technology, on its own and with the A370M GPU.
While the desktop-focused GPUs have yet to receive a release date as of now, a Techradar report notes they will be coming later this year in Q2. One additional tidbit of interest in that article revolves around Intel’s commitment to shipping out over 4 million GPUs this year.
The Intel announcement arrives after a leaked embargo document noted that Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 Ti could be released on March 29, a day before the Arc showcase. Whether or not that actually comes to fruition is up in the air though, given that Nvidia has not said anything yet.
