Intel finally announces Arc Graphics, their line of dedicated GPUs

[Chimpzy]

Long rumored, then all but confirmed, and now officially announced, Intel's first dedicated gaming GPU is slated to arrive in Q1 2022. Well technically, it is a suite that includes software and services, but for us gamers the GPU is of course the most interesting bit. It is codenamed Alchemist, with future gens named Battlemage, Druid and Celestial. Nothing is really known about its specs yet, let alone any performance benchmarks, but it has been confirmed the card will be capable of ray-tracing. Also, Intel has developed XeSS, its own AI-driven super sampling solution to compete with Nvidia's DLSS, which like AMD's FSR will not be proprietary, but work on other hardware.

Intel® Arc™ Graphics Overview

Find out how Intel® Arc Graphics unlock lifelike gaming and seamless content creation.

www.intel.com

Aside from digging the D&D-ass codenames, I'm quite interested to see what Intel will be bringing to the table, performance-wise, but also in terms of price. Aside from the inflation of prices due to the chip shortages obviosuly, it's no secret the cost of a GPU has gone up across all ranges. So if Intel were to somehow bring great bang for your buck value, that could make a splash, notably in the sub-300$ entry level card space, which neither Nvidia or AMD are really serving right now. Or maybe just the presence of an extra player could spur the other two on to some more competitive pricing and/or better features.

That's all conjecture tho, but considering Intel has literally 0% share in the dedicated GPU market, they'll likely need some kind of edge. Some selling point attractive enough to turn heads.

Anyway, thought?

 

[Chimpzy]

In case you want all the info wrapped up in one video

I'm assuming Digital Foundry, Linus and the other major tech channels will follow soon.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

Or maybe just the presence of an extra player could spur the other two on to some more competitive pricing and/or better features.

That's what I'm hoping for... Although waiting until next year is a little annoying.

Why is it that only two companies make GPUs anyway?

 

[Chimpzy]

Why is it that only two companies make GPUs anyway?

There used to be more. You had 3dfx, Matrox, Trident, Rendition, ATI, and so on, but over time they all either left the gpu market, went out of business and/or got absorbed into one of the others, until only Nvidia and AMD were left.

Tho there are actually more than two companies making GPUs. Intel is for example is technically the largest GPU vendor because of the integrated graphics on their CPUs, where Intel is still market leader (tho AMD has been catching up) and can be found in offices and whatnot all over. And companies like Apple and Qualcomm and such have their own usually ARM-based graphics solutions, tho those aren't talked about much on gaming-focused places because they are pretty much exclusively used in mobile devices like smartphones. Also some rare other companies making specialized custom hardware for professional purposes. Nvidia and AMD are simply the only ones doing dedicated add-in GPU's in the PC space that are focused on gaming.

As for why they are the only ones? Also simple. IPs and patents. Intel could've come up with a competitive design within a year if they wanted, but between the two of them, Nvidia and AMD hold so many IPs and patents for fundamental hardware and software features that Intel designing a GPU while dodging all of those IPs/patents would've been nigh impossible. So Intel was forced to redesign everything from the ground up. They basically had to reinvent the wheel. Which takes lots of r&d, and that takes time, not to mention insanely expensive.

Hence why only a tech giant like Intel had any real chance of pulling it off.

You've got a similar IP/patent situation in CPU's for PC actually, with Intel and AMD instead. It's why it took apple over 10 year before it got to the M1 chips.

 

[Dalisclock]

I do hope this helps the GPU prices and supply and I'm totally looking forward to seeing what Intel brings to the table here.

Also, just gonna mention for transparency that I work for Intel but not in any sort of Design or PR/Marketing capacity, so I know exactly as much the New GPUs as you guys do(that is, what's been released to the press and whatnot). Also, I don't have any particular favoritism towards them over AMD/Nvidia/etc. The PC I just built has an AMD CPU(Ryzen 5 5600) because it seemed like one of the better processors for my needs.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Yay, more hardware for scalpers to snap up and sell to us at double markup. Whee.

 

[gorfias]

Given the shortage seems a perfect time to jump back into making GPUs.

ATI... rings a bell! Absorbed by AMD? Or am I thinking of an unrelated computer architecture?

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

I do hope this helps the GPU prices and supply.

It won't. The same factories making AMD and Nvidia GPUs are going to be making the intel ones, and given the chip shortage I don't think they're going to be upping production. If a lot more factories start making the intel GPUs their output of the other GPUs will just be lower to compensate. The only meaningful addition will be the first party intel reference GPUs that Intel will be making in house, but those first party reference cards tend to be a much smaller potion of the overall GPU market than the 3rd party cards, and also in the case of AMD and Nvidia don't actually tend to be the best cards in the space. The 3rd party cards tend to have standard factory overclocks and better cooling and performance.

 

[Gordon_4]

Given the shortage seems a perfect time to jump back into making GPUs.

ATI... rings a bell! Absorbed by AMD? Or am I thinking of an unrelated computer architecture?

Yeah, AMD bought ATi. Makers of the once venerable Radeon 9800.......Christ I feel old XD

 

[Chimpzy]

Yeah, AMD bought ATi. Makers of the once venerable Radeon 9800.......Christ I feel old XD

I had one of those, a 9800 Pro to be exact, paired with a Pentium 4 3Ghz with a whopping whole gigabyte of DDR2. Ah, the nostalgia of running Doom 3 at ultra settings at kinda shitty framerates because I was a noob and didn't yet understand that just because I had a beefy GPU (for the time) I couldn't guaranteed max out every game.

 

[Gordon_4]

I had one of those, a 9800 Pro to be exact, paired with a Pentium 4 3Ghz with a whopping whole gigabyte of DDR2. Ah, the nostalgia of running Doom 3 at ultra settings at kinda shitty framerates because I was a noob and didn't yet understand that just because I had a beefy GPU (for the time) I couldn't guaranteed max out every game.

I had at the same time - I think - the nVidia 5800GT or something like it.

 

[09philj]

There used to be more. You had 3dfx, Matrox, Trident, Rendition, ATI, and so on, but over time they all either left the gpu market, went out of business and/or got absorbed into one of the others, until only Nvidia and AMD were left.

Tho there are actually more than two companies making GPUs. Intel is for example is technically the largest GPU vendor because of the integrated graphics on their CPUs, where Intel is still market leader (tho AMD has been catching up) and can be found in offices and whatnot all over. And companies like Apple and Qualcomm and such have their own usually ARM-based graphics solutions, tho those aren't talked about much on gaming-focused places because they are pretty much exclusively used in mobile devices like smartphones. Also some rare other companies making specialized custom hardware for professional purposes. Nvidia and AMD are simply the only ones doing dedicated add-in GPU's in the PC space that are focused on gaming.

As for why they are the only ones? Also simple. IPs and patents. Intel could've come up with a competitive design within a year if they wanted, but between the two of them, Nvidia and AMD hold so many IPs and patents for fundamental hardware and software features that Intel designing a GPU while dodging all of those IPs/patents would've been nigh impossible. So Intel was forced to redesign everything from the ground up. They basically had to reinvent the wheel. Which takes lots of r&d, and that takes time, not to mention insanely expensive.

The other thing is that GPUs are essentially a very simple product from the user point of view. If you can't get a good price to performance ratio there's no point even trying to sell it, there's no subjective aesthetic or ergonomic judgements to hide behind.

 

[Baffle]

For the people reminiscing, I had one of those awful bastard GPUs that came in a box with a terrible rendering of a weird-looking person on it.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

For the people reminiscing, I had one of those awful bastard GPUs that came in a box with a terrible rendering of a weird-looking person on it.

Y'know... that's actually not narrowing it down terribly much....

 

[meiam]

Could be interesting if intel is also serious about making more chip in house, maybe will help with card availability down the road *cries in 970*.

 

[Gordon_4]

Y'know... that's actually not narrowing it down terribly much....

Now see if he’d said sexy lady, that might have narrowed down to about fifteen years worth of Radeons.