Intel Arc is a brand of graphics processing units designed by Intel. 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 set to compete with Nvidia's GeForce and AMD's Radeon lines. The first generation, codenamed "Alchemist", is set to be released by the March 30, 2022. After Alchemist, three more generations are in development.
According to Intel, the brand is named after the concept of story arcs found in video games.
Developed under the previous codename "DG2", the first generation of Intel Arc GPUs (codenamed "Alchemist") is slated for release by the first quarter of 2022. It will come in both add-on desktop card and laptop form factors. TSMC is set to manufacture the die, using the TSMC N6 process.Alchemist uses the Intel Xe GPU architecture, or more specifically, the Xe-HPG variant. Alchemist will support hardware-based ray tracing, XeSS or supersampling based on neural networks (similar to Nvidia DLSS), and DirectX 12 Ultimate. Also supported is DisplayPort 2.0 and overclocking.
Intel confirmed ASTC support has been removed from hardware starting with Alchemist and future Intel Arc GPU microarchitectures will also not support it.
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 and later generations of CPU SoCs will use Intel Arc Tile GPU.
