Intel today revealed the brand for its upcoming consumer high-performance graphics products: Intel Arc. The Arc brand will cover hardware, software and services, and will span multiple hardware generations, with the first generation, based on the Xe HPG microarchitecture, code-named Alchemist (formerly known as DG2).
Intel Arc, is the company's new high-performance gaming graphics brand, which was announced today completely unexpected. Arc is Intel's is the graphics card series naming much like "GeForce and Radeon", and an attempt to compete with the AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce brands in the gaming graphics industry. To make it more confusing, these are all tagged under the name Alchemist. As if to send a message, the firm published the codenames for the first three generations of Arc: "Battlemage," "Celestial," and "Druid," all of which are variations on the first one .. "Battlemage." "Battlemage" is likely the fancy new codename for the Xe HPG graphics architecture, which has already been implemented in a working prototype called the DG2 and is now known as "Alchemist." Intel has announced that "Battlemage" is being built to fulfill DirectX 12 Ultimate requirements, which implies it will have hardware-accelerated real-time raytracing, mesh shaders, sampler feedback, and variable-rate shading, among other features.
Mentioned is an artificial intelligence-accelerated supersampling function in the chips. Which would be a direct competitor to NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR. While Intel has stated that the first consumer products based on the "Alchemist" silicon will be available in the first quarter of 2022, it has also stated that further specifications will be released throughout the year 2021, leading up to the launch.
-- Intel --
Intel also revealed the code names of future generations under the Arc brand: Battlemage, Celestial and Druid.
“Today marks a key moment in the graphics journey we started just a few years ago. The launch of the Intel Arc brand and the reveal of future hardware generations signifies Intel’s deep and continued commitment to gamers and creators everywhere. We have teams doing incredible work to ensure we deliver first-class and frictionless experiences when these products are available early next year.”
–Roger Chandler, Intel vice president and general manager of Client Graphics Products and Solutions
Intel Xe is a scalable graphics and compute architecture designed to deliver exceptional performance and functionality spanning integrated to discrete and data centers to supercomputers.
Upcoming Intel Arc graphics products are based on the Xe-HPG microarchitecture, a convergence of Intel’s Xe LP, HP and HPC microarchitectures, that will deliver scalability and compute efficiency with advanced graphics features. Alchemist, the first generation of Intel Arc products, will feature hardware-based ray tracing and artificial intelligence-driven super sampling, and offer full support for DirectX 12 Ultimate.
Intel’s long-term vision is to bring frictionless gaming and content creation experiences to gamers and creators worldwide, giving them innovation and choice in hardware coupled with open and accessible software tools.
Alchemist products will arrive in the first quarter of 2022. Please visit Intel.com/Arc for more details, with more specifics arriving later in 2021.
