It’s time for Intel’s new Arc A-series laptop GPUs to go on sale. With today’s debut of its first Arc A-series laptop graphics processors, Intel has officially begun its discrete GPU revolution after months of previews and teases. At least for the initial wave of GPUs, they have DirectX 12 capability and ray-tracing technology, but only around double the power of Intel’s integrated Xe graphics.
These laptop GPUs support DirectX 12 Ultimate and hardware-based raytracing, as well as Intel’s innovative XeSS AI-powered supersampling and will be available in the second half of this year when more of these GPUs are released.
Considering that the graphics card market is booming, Intel’s upcoming Arc GPUs, which will compete with AMD and Nvidia, are significant because they might offer much-needed competition (and increase the supply of GPUs) to the sector.
It will be some time before desktop computers start shipping with Intel Arc graphics cards. Arc 3 GPU-equipped laptops such as Samsung’s Galaxy Book2 Pro are now the only ones available; you may get one of these laptops with an Arc 3 GPU already installed. The Arc 5 and Arc 7 mobile GPUs will be available in laptops from partners including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and others later this year if you need more power.
For present, there are two Arc 3 GPUs available: the A350M and the A370M, which have higher power. Intel claims that the former is better suited for laptops that stress portability and thinness, while the latter is better suited for gaming.
With these chips, we can get our first look at what Intel’s next generation of discrete graphics cards will be like. They include specific capabilities that allow them to function particularly well with Intel’s 21st-generation processors to give increased performance in computationally intensive apps like Adobe Photoshop, Handbrake, and XSplit. A350M has six Xe cores and six raytracing units whereas the A370M has eight. Both GPUs have 4GB of DDR6 RAM.
These “Xe cores” are, at their most basic, specialised computing units designed for gaming and content production applications. Because of the Xe media engine and the Matrix Extensions (XMX) AI engines (which power Intel’s new XeSS AI-powered supersampling technology) and the Xe media engine, which is capable of hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding (an open-source media codec), Intel claims that its Arc GPUs will excel in these areas.
Intel Arc 3 laptop GPUs may be used for gaming
It appears that Intel’s new XeSS upscaling technology (which utilises Xe cores to algorithmically increase the display resolution to, say, 4K while maintaining performance you would expect at 1080p) is good enough to compete with Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution, which both use similar techniques to upscaling.
However, Intel has said that XeSS will not be accessible until later this summer, and only in certain titles, including the “unique integration” in Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding Director’s Cut that was previewed at the CES 2022. However, don’t forget that XeSS is GPU-agnostic, which means that although it is tuned to perform best on Intel processors, certain Nvidia and AMD GPUs are also supported.
To put it another way, if you have an older Nvidia GPU that does not support Nvidia’s own DLSS technology, you may be able to squeeze higher performance out of it with the help of this new technology from Intel. It’s worth the wait.
This video shows Apex Legends and Destiny 2: The Witch Queen operating at over 60 frames per second on the A370M, and Intel claims to be working with game developers to guarantee their games run well on Arc GPUs.
Although the Arc’s low-end laptop GPU is purportedly capable of such framerates, it’s still impressive to see. If anything this just serves to pique my interest for what Intel has in store for us later this year. XeSS is still not operational and Arc 5 and 7 laptop GPUs, as well as Arc desktop GPUs that have been rumoured, are still in development.
Future
DirectX 12 Ultimate and the new XeSS upscaling technology on Intel’s newest graphics cards, as well as hardware-based raytracing, appear likely to provide much-needed relief to the undersupplied GPU market.
For the time being, we don’t know how these new Arc 3 GPUs rank up against Nvidia and AMD laptop GPUs in terms of functionality and core counts, but based on what we know so far Intel looks to be bringing significant heat to the GPU streets this year.