Intel’s New Arc Graphics Cards are Desgined for Gaming

Intel announced today that their new line of graphics cards – previously known as DG2 – will be rebranded as Arc, entering the company into the discrete graphics card market in Q1 2022.

The first Arc card will be named Alchemist.

Billed as helping users “game, create, and stream”, a teaser trailer has been posted to their Twitter account featuring multiple upcoming or popular games like PUBG and even benchmark fodder, Metro Exodus. Upcoming games in there include the newly remastered Crysis Trilogy and Microsoft’s Double Fine’s Psychonauts 2.

Here's a sneak peek of pre-production Intel Arc graphics in action. https://t.co/VOMsMN6r2y #IntelArc pic.twitter.com/b9fOsXdRCq

— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) August 16, 2021

Intel hasn’t revealed a whole lot about what these cards can truly do, but the trailer is promising if it includes multiple major titles that all seem – aside from a couple – to be GPU intensive.

The Arc graphics cards will be featured in laptops and desktops from next year, with ‘AI-accelerated super sampling’ being touted as Intel’s competitor to NVIDIA’s DLSS and AMD’s spatial upscaling software, FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). These techniques allow games to run at higher quality, but the lower resolution is then blown up to bring new life to older cards or provide smoother experiences for newer cards that might not be capable of running at full whack.

These graphics cards will also be able to do real-time ray tracing, something that both of the other two manufacturers are gunning for dominance over.

We don’t have any at the moment, as Intel are keeping this close to the chest as of now. The “Battlemage”, “Celestial” and “Druid” cards (at least these codenames aren’t so self-serious) are all going to be revealed with more specs and presumed benchmarks being released later on in 2021.

It’s good to have some competition in the mix between the Red Team and Green Team, as Intel’s Blueish-Purple brand seems to be coming out swinging and not pulling any punches if the above teaser trailer is to be believed. We’ll have more later on as details emerge. Intel’s Xe line of mobile chips have impressed, so maybe the Arc brand will cement them as a serious player.

This all said I’m enjoying that an unproven product has a t-shirt already.