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It feels like ages ago when Intel first started working on its discrete graphics chips, which will finally be shipping soon under the Intel Arc brand name.
A trio of Intel Arc graphics chip families will be launched in April and will be rolled out further in the summer with a focus on thin and light gaming laptops.
Getting this far is something of a miracle for Intel, which lost its biggest graphics battle in the 1990s when Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices’ Radeon graphics chips stole the market for standalone graphics chips. Intel maintained its lead in central processing units (CPUs), but graphics processing units (GPUs) gained a lot of value in the system as 3D games matured and again when parallel processing took off for AI computing.
Intel still got a big share of the market as it focused on integrated graphics that combined graphics with another part of the system. But it’s always been eyeing the standalone graphics chip market, and now it’s finally going head-to-head with AMD and Nvidia to go after lucrative gamers.
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The first laptops with Intel Arc 3 GPUs are now available for pre-order and will be followed by the more powerful
designs with Intel Arc 5 and Intel Arc 7 graphics in early summer.
“It’s a modern GPU architecture with room to grow. I think it gives Intel a seat at the table,” said Kevin Krewell, an analyst at Tirias Research, in an email to GamesBeat.
Intel has a new brand for standalone graphics: Arc.
“It’s exciting to hear today as we are launching our discrete graphics,” Intel’s Martyn Stroeve, senior director of graphics product marketing, said in a news conference. “I have been involved in many product launches during my 18 years at Intel. But never have I been so excited as today.
Intel said its A Series products are built on its Xe HPG architecture for gamers and creators. It has a new Xe graphics core, a new media engine, AI engines, a new rendering engine for a variety of rendering interfaces, hardware acceleration for ray tracing, and a graphics pipeline optimized for Microsoft’s DirectX 12 Ultimate software.
Intel has partnered with top computer manufacturers to co-develop a line of laptops with new and improved gaming and content creation capabilities featuring Intel Arc graphics and 12th Gen Intel Core processors.
The technical details
Intel’s graphics start with a Render Slice.
Intel’s designs start with a render slice, or a reusable building block, stamped over its chip over and over. It is a collection of Xe cores (as many as 32), threading units, geometry, rasterization blocks and render packages. It has hardware acceleration for tasks like ray tracing, which allows shadows and lighting to be rendered correctly in images (something Nvidia has developed in modern graphics chips). It has 16 vector engines. And it also has a lot of room for AI processing, Intel fellow Tom Petersen said in a news conference.
Laptops with Intel Arc 3 graphics offer enhanced 1080p gaming and advanced content creation, and those with
Intel Arc 5 and Intel Arc 7 graphics offer the same advanced content creation capabilities along with
improved graphics and computing performance.
The chips feature Intel Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX) AI engines, which provide more computing power to accelerate AI workloads. These AI engines have 16 times the computing power to complete AI inference operations compared to traditional GPU vector units, which can improve performance in productivity, gaming and creator applications.
Intel’s various graphics enhancement features.
The new graphics chips also feature Super Sampling, a riff on similar technology from Nvidia and Intel. It uses the power of AI to upscale graphics to make them appear at a higher quality level without using a ton of extra computing power. In a demo of a game called Dolman, Intel showed side-by-side comparisons of what the technology adds to visuals.
“It’s an image scaling technique that delivers really high-quality rendered images from a relatively modest original raster image,” says Petersen.
The first chips were the A350M for ultra-thin laptop designs and the A370M for more performance in thin and light designs. Intel Arc 3 graphics focus on 1080p gaming and advanced content creation. Intel said Arc A370M-based laptops will deliver more than 60 frames per second at 1080p on a range of popular titles.
Intel Arc 5 and Arc 7 graphics products provide content creation capabilities along with improved graphics and computing performance. These GPUs will have more Xe cores, more ray tracing units and more GDDR6 memory compared to Arc 3 products. These products all vary based on the number of Xe cores on the chip.
The first laptops with Arc 3 graphics are available for pre-order now, with Arc 5 and Arc 7 laptops coming early summer. Intel’s Arc graphics for desktops and plug-in cards will launch in the summer.
The first Intel Arc graphics-powered laptops
Intel’s Xe Architecture
Intel’s pitch is that it delivers quality across the board with its complete systems.
Many of the first laptops with Intel Arc graphics will be Intel Evo designs with the latest 12th Gen Intel Core
processors, enabling users to get the most out of thin and light machines with Wi-Fi 6, responsiveness and battery life.
Intel notes that the performance of the media engine in video editing tasks is superior, thanks to the sophisticated technology for that purpose. Intel expects a 50% to 60% increase in video code performance.
Devon Nekechuk, director of graphics product management, said in a press conference that the Arc A370M offers about twice the performance of an integrated GPU. In addition to gamers, Intel is going after content creators. And that’s where video performance matters, as the Intel-powered laptops can deliver up to 1.6 times the transcoding performance when processing 4K media, Nekechuk said.
Intel’s Arc 3 chips are coming soon, and 5 and 7 are coming later this year.
“The experience and kind of gaming we’re targeting with this product is really 1080p resolution when playing typical games at medium to high settings,” he said. “We deliver beautiful, smooth 60 frames per second for many of these popular titles.”
In some titles, such as Fortnite or Rocket League, the A370M can reach 90 frames per second.
“This is going to be great for gamers who want some fast-paced high-end games to run on their day-to-day basis carry their ultra-portable class platform,” Nekechuk said. “Gaming is a huge focus for us. In recent years. I’ve seen this massive increase in the internal focus we have on gaming as part of our graphics roadmap.”
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This post Intel launches Arc graphics chips for gaming laptops
was original published at “https://venturebeat.com/2022/03/30/intel-launches-arc-graphics-chips-for-gaming-laptops/”