Skip to main content

Everything just announced at Intel’s Arc graphics event

After having teased its new line of Intel Arc discrete graphics cards last year, Intel is finally debuting its first discrete graphics for laptops. The Intel Arc A-series will comprise several different cards targeting both ultra thin and light laptops under the Intel Evo branding and traditional laptop form factors. Gamers and content creators will be able to choose between the Intel Arc 3-series, 5-series, and premium 7-series range of discrete GPUs, the company announced today.

“We built a foundation and power-efficient integrated graphics that ships in the majority of laptops today,” Roger Chandler, Intel vice president and general manager of graphics and gaming, said of his company’s journey to arriving at Arc. “From Ultrabook to EVO, our focus has always been platform-level innovation. And now we’ve arrived at the next big milestone completing the Intel platform — with discrete graphics.”

Intel's Roger Chandler announces new features of discrete Intel Arc GPUs.
Intel

DirectX 12 Ultimate

The Arc series of graphics will include DirectX 12 Ultimate support, hardware-accelerated A.I. processing, ray tracing, and support for the new AV1 media engine. The new engine includes hardware-enabled encode and decode capabilities for faster performance. This makes the Arc discrete GPUs competitive against rival graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD.

Recommended Videos

“Every Arc GPU offers full support for DirectX 12 Ultimate, including hardware-accelerated ray tracing and Arc in conjunction with the 12th Gen Intel Core processors will be direct storage capable,” Intel said during its presentation.

Intel Arc Alchemist reference design render shows a graphics card on a blue background.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Intel announced that Arc will also launch on desktops and workstations later this year. Arc will launch first with the 3-series graphics for laptops, which will be available starting today, and expand to the 5-series and 7-series later this year.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

Compared to integrated Iris graphics, Intel said that Arc essentially doubles the graphics performance in thin-and-light form factors.

An Intel Arc graphic shows that it comes with plenty of features for super-slim notebooks.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

The first 3-series Arc laptops will be available with either a base A350M for Intel Evo laptops or a more performance-tuned A370M for thin and light — Ultrabook — notebooks.

“These laptops will deliver over 60 frames per second (fps) at 1080 p on a range of popular titles,” Chandler said. “You can see that Intel Arc 3 delivers over 90 frames per second, enabling competitive gaming on the go and some of the most portable designs in the industry.”

Intel announced that it is working with a growing list of game developers to bring more titles to the platform.

Intel uses a video game to show off new Xe Super Sampling.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

XeSS coming this summer

“Arc 5- and Arc 7-based laptops will be packed with even more,” Chandler added. “You’ll get more Xe cores, more fixed function ray tracing acceleration, more GDD6 memory, and ultimately more performance. They will also ship with a new technology designed to deliver more efficient performance, which we call Xe super sampling, known as XeSS.”

XeSS will upscale graphics for higher-resolution displays without taxing the system’s hardware resources, making details appear more clear and crisp on games. This is great for upscaling to a 2K or 4K resolution display, and Intel’s demo shows that there are more details in background and foreground game elements with XeSS enabled.

Intel's Roger Chandler announces that XeSS is launching in summer 2022.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

“XeSS is our solution,” Chandler said, noting that the technology leverages “the power of ARCs XMX A.I. engines to deliver high-performance A.I.-accelerated upscaling.”

XeSS will be coming later this summer and the technology will support all Arc discrete graphics. More than 20 game titles will be supported at launch, with Intel claiming that more will be added soon.

Intel's Roger Chandler explains how Intel XMX uses the power of A.I.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

The power of XMX A.I.

In addition to XeSS, Intel is also making a huge push with A.I. on the Arc series of GPUs.

“We built Intel Arc’s XMX A.I. acceleration engines to power A.I. workloads now and in the future,” Chandler said. “Our A.I. engines have 16 times the compute for A.I. inferencing operations when compared to traditional GPU vector units, which can enable performance boosts in many productivity gaming and creator applications.”

In a demo, Intel showed how popular video-editing titles can denoise old family videos and upscale these videos to the modern era by emulating how they would look if captured through a 4K camera. An old NASA rocket launch, for example, showed how the “United States” font on the rocket appears more crisp with A.I. enhancements applied.

“Our XMX engines seamlessly accelerate this compute -ntensive A.I. process to give you amazing results in half the time,” Intel explained. “With the power of XMX, this upscaling is more than twice as fast as integrated graphics alone.”

A comparison uses Elden Ring to show how Intel Arc's AV1 support delivers much better streaming performance.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Native AV1 support

And with support for AV1 codecs, Intel’s Arc GPUs are the world’s first to come with native AV1 support. The company demonstrated how AV1 support will render more details in titles such as Elden Ring and that hardware support delivers a 50x improvement in encoding speeds versus traditional implementations.

The company is also rolling out a new Intel Deep Link integration to support every Intel Arc and Iris GPU to help gamers and creators leverage the technologies available to them.

“It enables dynamic power sharing, intelligently distributing power across the platform to increase application performance up to 30% on creation and compute intensive applications,” Intel said of Intel Deep Link. “It also includes hyper compute, which enables a significant speed up in A.I. heavy applications. In the XMX video demo we showed you earlier, we saw an additional 24% performance improvement when we leverage all available A.I. engines in the system.”

Intel's Roger Chandler explains how Intel Arc Control is a hub for your GPU settings.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

For gamers, a new Arc Control interface will bring day-zero-ready game drivers, custom performance profiles, and more.

A graphic featuring a laptop outlines how Intel EVO with Arc delivers impressive battery life.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

One of the Arc 3 laptops that will be available to pre-order today is the Samsung Galaxy Book 2, though Intel named a number of partners that it is working with — from Acer to HP — to launch new Ultrabooks and EVO notebooks featuring its new discrete GPUs.

A graphic shows 10 laptops with Intel Arc GPUs that are coming soon.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Intel EVO laptops still retain their stated nine-hour battery life, the company claims.

Chuong Nguyen
Silicon Valley-based technology reporter and Giants baseball fan who splits his time between Northern California and Southern…
Prices for Intel’s Arc B580 are already shooting through the roof
The Intel logo on the Arc B580 graphics card.

Intel just launched its new $249 Arc B580 graphics card, and as you can read in our Intel Arc B580 review, it's one of the best graphics cards you can buy. It seems PC gamers have gotten the memo, as most models of the card are sold out online. If you want to get one now, you'll have to spend close to double the list price.

Looking at online retailers, it looks like Newegg has the most models listed for sale, though almost all of them are sold out. The only models available come from Gunnir, and they're both very expensive. The , while the . Both are sold by third-party sellers -- they aren't sold and shipped by Newegg -- so I wouldn't recommend spending up for one of these cards.

Read more
Intel’s new $249 GPU brings 1440p gaming to the masses
An exploded view of Intel's Arc A580 GPU.

Intel is trying to redefine what a "budget GPU" really means in 2024, and it's doing so with the new Arc B580 GPU. In what Intel itself described as its "worst kept secret," the B580 is the debut graphics card in Intel's new Battlemage range of discrete GPUs, and it's arriving at just $249. That's a price point that's been relegated to 1080p for decades, but Intel says the B580 will change that dynamic.

It's a 1440p GPU, at least by Intel's definition. That's despite the fact that Intel is comparing the card to GPUs like the RTX 4060 and RX 7600, both of which are more expensive than the B580 and squarely target 1080p. Intel says it can deliver higher performance than these two GPUs while undercutting the price, all in an attempt to capitalize on 1440p gamers. "1440p is becoming 1080p," as Intel's Tom Petersen put it in a pre-briefing with the press.

Read more
Intel just stole a page from Nvidia’s DLSS playbook
hp omen transcend 32 review 13

Intel is giving its XeSS upscaling tech a huge makeover. The aptly-named XeSS 2 steals -- or borrows, if we're being generous -- a page from Nvidia's DLSS 3, which has been a staple feature of some of the best graphics cards you can buy. XeSS 2 comes packed with super resolution like the original version, but also frame generation and a latency-reducing feature called XeLL. And it's launching alongside the new B580 graphics card.

Point-for-point, XeSS 2 is basically identical to DLSS 3. The super resolution portion functions much in the same way as the original XeSS, providing you with various different quality settings to render your game at a lower resolution in order to improve performance. On the upscaling side, the major change is native support for DirectX 12 and Vulkan, which should open up XeSS to more games.

Read more