Intel Gaming GPUs to be branded as ARC, to launch in early 2022

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.

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Intel also revealed the code names of future generations under the Arc brand: Battlemage, Celestial and Druid.