When it comes to discussing which company produces the best graphics card for your gaming PC, Intel probably wouldn’t even cross your mind, but that could all change in 2022. The company is set to take on both AMD and Nvidia next year, with its first generation Arc Alchemist GPUs.
Intel has managed to keep its Alchemist cards mostly under wraps, but this hasn’t stopped benchmarks and spec sheets leaking ahead of the official launch date. First revealed in August, we’re expecting team blue to pull back the curtain on its Xe-HPG based graphics cards during CES 2022.
Alchemist GPUs face stiff competition from the likes of Nvidia’s RTX 3000 and AMD’s RX 6000 cards, but the rumoured 2022 launches of RTX 4000 and RDNA 3 loom large on the horizon. Regardless of how they end up performing, XeSS should help spice up proceedings against competing upscaling technologies like Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR.
Here’s everything we know about Intel’s Arc Alchemist GPUs:
Intel Arc Alchemist GPU release date
During The Game Awards 2021, Intel reaffirmed that we can expect the Arc Alchemist GPU release date to fall sometime during Q1 2022, which was previously hinted at when team blue’s GPUs were first revealed in August.
The company is expected to reveal a more exact launch date during its CES 2022 presentation, on January 4, 2022.
Intel Arc Alchemist GPU price
Intel has kept quiet regarding the price of its Arc Alchemist graphics cards, and there haven’t been any leaks that might give us a hint at any kind of MSRP. However, we do know that Intel is working with board partners like Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI to provide multiple variants of its GPUs, something that should help facilitate a variety of price points.
Intel Arc Alchemist GPU specs
Alchemist cards will be the first Intel GPUs to be built with the Xe-HPG (Xe-High Performance Graphics) architecture. They’ll support ray tracing and will supposedly offer a great performance boost when using XeSS (Xe Super Sampling) compared to other Nvidia and AMD compatible cards.
Some leaks suggest we may see Alchemist cards with 6GB of GDDR6 VRAM, which should be more than enough for 1080p or even 1440p gaming. Unfortunately, this may make them a target for crypto miners, and Intel doesn’t plan on doing anything to inhibit Alchemist’s mining performance.
Intel Arc Alchemist GPU benchmarks
It was initially proposed that Intel’s Alchemist GPUs would rival the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, but more recent benchmarks place at least once card’s performance closer to an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Super.
However, like all leaks, these benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt, especially ones that arrive well before Alchemist’s release date. As soon as we get our hands on Intel’s GPUs, we’ll be happy to share our frame rate graphs and other findings.
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