Intel Arc is a brand of

graphics processing units A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mob ...

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

. These are discrete GPUs mostly marketed for the high-margin PC gaming market. The brand also covers Intel's consumer graphics software and services. Intel Arc is competing with

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

GeForce GeForce is a brand of graphics processing units (GPUs) designed by Nvidia. As of the GeForce 40 series, there have been eighteen iterations of the design. The first GeForce products were discrete GPUs designed for add-on graphics boards, inte ...

and

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

's Radeon lines. The Arc-A series for laptops was launched on March 30, 2022, with the Arc 5 and 7 "set to arrive later this year in 'early summer.' " Intel missed their initial Q2 2022 release target, with most discrete Arc GPUs not launching until October 2022. Intel officially launched the Arc Pro workstation GPUs on August 8, 2022.

Etymology

According to Intel, the brand is named after the concept of

story arc A story arc (also narrative arc) is the chronological construction of plot in a novel or story. It can also mean an extended or continuing storyline in episodic storytelling media such as television, comic books, comic strips, board games, vid ...

s found in video games. Each generation of Arc is named after each letter of the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...

in ascending order, beginning with A, then B, then C, and so on. The first generation is named Alchemist, while Battlemage, Celestial and Druid are the respective names for the second, third and fourth Arc generations.

Graphics processor generations

Alchemist

Developed under the previous codename "DG2", the first generation of Intel Arc GPUs (codenamed "Alchemist") released on March 30, 2022. It will come in both add-on desktop card and laptop form factors.

TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC; also called Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the world's most valuable semiconductor company, the world' ...

manufactures the die, using their N6 process. Alchemist uses the

Intel Xe Intel Xe (stylized as Xe and pronounced as two separate letters, abbreviation for "eXascale for everyone"), earlier known unofficially as Gen12, is a GPU architecture developed by Intel. Intel Xe includes a new instruction set architecture. Th ...

GPU architecture, or more specifically, the Xe-HPG variant. Alchemist supports hardware-based ray tracing, XeSS or

supersampling Supersampling or supersampling anti-aliasing (SSAA) is a spatial anti-aliasing method, i.e. a method used to remove aliasing (jagged and pixelated edges, colloquially known as "jaggies") from images rendered in computer games or other computer p ...

based on neural networks (similar to Nvidia's DLSS), and DirectX 12 Ultimate. Also supported is DisplayPort 2.0 and overclocking.

AV1 AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 th ...

fixed-function hardware encoder is included in Alchemist GPUs as part of the

Intel Quick Sync Video Intel Quick Sync Video is Intel's brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware core. Quick Sync was introduced with the Sandy Bridge CPU microarchitecture on 9 January 2011 and has been found on the die of Intel CPUs ever since. ...

core. Intel confirmed ASTC support has been removed from hardware starting with Alchemist and future Intel Arc GPU microarchitectures will also not support it. Intel revealed that ''Meteor Lake'' and later generations of CPU SoCs will use Intel Arc Tile GPU. Intel Arc Alchemist does not support SR-IOV. Intel Arc Alchemist does not support Direct3D 9 natively, instead falling back on the D3D9On12 wrapper which translates Direct3D 9 calls to their Direct3D 12 equivalents. Intel Arc support OpenCL 3.0 for example, this GPU can work in the

grid Grid, The Grid, or GRID may refer to: Common usage * Cattle grid or stock grid, a type of obstacle is used to prevent livestock from crossing the road * Grid reference, used to define a location on a map Arts, entertainment, and media * News ...

World Community Grid World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest volunteer computing platform to tackle scientific research that benefits humanity. Launched on November 16, 2004, with proprietary Grid MP client from United Devices and addin ...

Desktop

Mobile

Workstation

Future generations

Intel also revealed future generations of Intel Arc GPUs under development: Battlemage (based on Xe²), Celestial (based on Xe³), and Druid. Battlemage will succeed Alchemist. Intel revealed that

Meteor Lake A meteoroid () is a small rocky or metallic body in outer space. Meteoroids are defined as objects significantly smaller than asteroids, ranging in size from grains to objects up to a meter wide. Objects smaller than this are classified as mi ...

and later generations of CPU SoCs will use an Intel Arc Tile GPU.

Intel XeSS

Intel XeSS is a

real-time Real-time or real time describes various operations in computing or other processes that must guarantee response times within a specified time (deadline), usually a relatively short time. A real-time process is generally one that happens in defined ...

deep learning image

upsampling In digital signal processing, upsampling, expansion, and interpolation are terms associated with the process of resampling in a multi-rate digital signal processing system. ''Upsampling'' can be synonymous with ''expansion'', or it can describe a ...

technology developed primarily for use in video games as a competitor to Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR technologies. Additionally, XeSS is not restricted to Intel Arc graphics cards. It does utilize XMX instructions exclusive to Intel Arc graphics cards, but will fall back to utilizing DP4a instructions on competing GPUs that have support for DP4a instructions. XeSS is trained with 64 samples per pixel as opposed to Nvidia DLSS's 16 samples per pixel ( 16K reference images).

Quality presets

Issues

Drivers

Performance on Intel Arc GPUs has suffered from poor driver support, particularly at launch. An investigation by Gamers Nexus discovered 43 known driver issues with Arc GPUs, prompting a response and acknowledgement of the issues from Intel. Intel CEO

Pat Gelsinger Patrick Paul Gelsinger (; born March 5, 1961) is an American business executive and engineer currently serving as CEO of Intel. Based mainly in Silicon Valley since the late 1970s, Gelsinger graduated from Stanford University with a master's deg ...

also blamed driver problems as a reason for Arc's delayed launch. A beta driver from October 2022 accidentally reduced the memory clock by 9% on the Arc A770 from 2187MHz to 2000MHz, resulting in a 17% reduction in memory bandwidth. This particular issue was later fixed.

DirectX 9 compatibility

Officially, Intel Arc only supports the

DirectX 11 Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...

DirectX 12 Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct" ...

and

Vulkan Vulkan is a low- overhead, cross-platform API, open standard for 3D graphics and computing. Vulkan targets high-performance real-time 3D graphics applications, such as video games and interactive media. Vulkan is intended to offer higher perfor ...

APIs in games. As a result, Arc GPUs perform worse in older games that are based exclusively on

DirectX 9 Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct" ...

such as '' CS:GO'', ''

League of Legends ''League of Legends'' (''LoL''), commonly referred to as ''League'', is a 2009 multiplayer online battle arena video game developed and published by Riot Games. Inspired by '' Defense of the Ancients'', a custom map for ''Warcraft III'', ...

'' and ''

StarCraft II ''StarCraft II'' is a military science fiction video game created by Blizzard Entertainment as a sequel to the successful ''StarCraft'' video game released in 1998. Set in a fictional future, the game centers on a galactic struggle for dominance ...

'' when compared to similar GPUs from

and

. There is also a performance gap between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12. A December 2022 driver update improved Arc compatibility and performance with

-based games. According to Intel, the driver update made Arc GPUs up to 1.8x faster in DirectX 9 games.

References

External links

Official website

{{Intel Computer-related introductions in 2022 Graphics processing units Graphics cards Intel graphics