Intel Arc gets real

Intel Arc

Third party! Intel today unveiled the branding for its upcoming high-end discrete gaming graphics cards that have so far gone under the Xe banner. All such products, hardware and software, will henceforth carry this new branding.

As a matter of pure fact, the Arc branding will serve all future generations of the company’s discrete graphics. Think of its the GeForce line for NVIDIA and Radeon from AMD.

With this, we finally have Team Blue entering the ring in a triple-threat matchup against Team Green and Team Red.

Intel revealed these details in a press release, confirming with the same stroke of the brush its plans for the release of Arc products. The chip giant says that the first Arc products will come to both desktop and notebooks in the first quarter of next year, as in Q1 2022.

A rumored launch of these first-generation lineup at CES 2022 is on the cards — pun always intended.

Alongside this confirmation, we have news of the codename that these graphics cards will fly as. The first-generation lineup goes by as Alchemist, while Battlemage is second-generation, Celestial being third-generation products, while the fourth-generation will be known as Druid.

Pretty random, as codenames go, but there you have it!

Intel will reveal more details about these upcoming architectures at a later date.

And speaking of details, the company talked a bit about the first-generation Arc architecture, Alchemist. We have confirmation that these will feature hardware-accelerated raytracing, alongside the company’s own AI driven super sampling technology similar to NVIDIA DLSS, internally called XeSS.

Alchemist will also have full support for the DirectX 12 Ultimate API.

Have your wallets and credit cards on the ready, folks!