Intel launches Arc GPUs powering up gaming laptops to take on AMD and Nvidia
Intel has revealed the first of its Arc Alchemist graphics cards, and as we already knew, these initial offerings are laptop class GPUs.
Intel’s lower-end Arc 3 mobile GPUs will be the first to launch in gaming laptops starting from right now, with a pair of these unveiled by Intel. Then, an Arc 5 (midrange) product (there’s just a single GPU in this bracket) will follow in notebooks early in the summer of 2022.
That’ll be accompanied by top-end (high-performance) Arc 7 laptop graphics cards at the same time, and presumably when Intel says early summer, we’re talking June. So, let’s break these down in more detail and look at the exact specs.
The Arc 3 GPUs which will be available in gaming laptops right off the bat are the A350M and A370M, entry-level products with 6 and 8 Xe-cores respectively. Both have 4GB of GDDR6 VRAM on board with a 64-bit memory bus, with the A350M sporting a clock speed of 1150MHz and the A370M upping that considerably to 1550MHz.
Power consumption is 25W to 35W for the A350M, and unsurprisingly the A370M uses more juice at 35W to 50W (exact power draw depends on how the laptop maker configures these GPUs).
Looking further down the launch timeline, the mid-range Arc 5 mobile graphics card is the A550M which runs with 16 Xe-cores clocked at 900MHz, doubling up the VRAM to 8GB (and widening the memory bus to 128-bit). Power will sit at between 60W and 80W for this GPU.
Finally, the high-end cards are the A730M and A770M which bristle with 24 and 32 Xe-cores respectively. The lesser A730M is clocked at 1100MHz and has 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM with a 192-bit bus, and power usage of 80W to 120W.
Intel has clocked the mobile flagship A770M at 1650MHz and this GPU has 16GB of video RAM with a 256-bit bus. Power consumption is 120W to 150W maximum.
Never mind the raw specs, you may well be saying at this point: what about actual performance? Well, Intel does provide some internal benchmarking – add condiments as necessary when a company tests its own stuff as part of a launch, naturally – but only for the Arc 3 graphics cards which are coming out now.
The A370M is pitched as providing ‘competitive frame rates’ for gaming at 1080p resolution, exceeding a very smooth 90 frames per second (fps) in Fortnite (where the GPU hits 94 fps at medium details), GTA V (105 fps, medium details), Rocket League (105 fps, high details) and Valorant (115 fps, high details).
Intel provides some further game benchmarks showing over 60 fps performance in the likes of Hitman 3 (62 fps, medium details) Doom Eternal (63 fps, high details), Destiny 2 (66 fps, medium details), and Wolfenstein: Youngblood (78 fps, medium details).
All of those benchmarks are taken with the A370M running in conjunction with an Intel Core i7-12700H processor, and comparisons are provided to Intel’s Iris Xe integrated GPU in a Core i7-1280P CPU.
Intel broadly claims that Arc 3 offers up to double the performance of Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, and the benchmarks bear this out in some cases, with generally sizeable gains across the board (in rarer worst-scenario cases, such as Rocket League, the A370M looks to be only around 20% faster, which is still a noticeable boost of course).
(Image credit: Intel)
Analysis: A solid looking start, and we can’t wait to see the rest of Intel’s alchemy
As mentioned at the outset, the first laptops with Arc 3 GPUs are supposedly available now – we’d previously heard from Intel that they’d be out on launch day, or the day after – and the one Intel highlights is the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro.
Hopefully, there should be a good deal of models out there soon enough – from all major laptop makers, as you’d expect – featuring Arc 3 graphics, which will happily slot into ultra-thins like the Galaxy Book2 Pro, providing what looks like pretty solid 1080p gaming performance (running the likes of Doom Eternal on high details in excess of 60 fps). The pricing of these laptops is set to start from $899 (around £680, AU$1,200), Intel notes.
It’s a shame we didn’t get any indication of how the mid-range Arc 5 – which is something of an oddity with its base clock dipping right down to 900MHz – and high-end Arc 7 products will perform, but then they don’t launch for a few months yet. What Intel can pull off here will tell us much more about how Arc will pan out in this first generation, and how the much-awaited desktop graphics cards – also expected to land in Q2 – will challenge AMD and Nvidia in gaming PCs.
Also of note is that during this launch, Intel let us know that XeSS, its frame rate boosting tech (to rival Nvidia DLSS, and AMD FSR) won’t debut with these first mobile GPUs, but rather will arrive in the summer with the big gun Arc graphics cards. Over 20 games will be supported initially.
