Intel launches first Arc GPUs, plan to sell least powerful ones first

Intel has finally launched its first Arc A-series GPUs for laptops, with support for DirectX 12. They come with twice the power of the company’s integrated Xe graphics and feature dedicated ray-tracing hardware. The A-series is the least powerful Arc 3 series GPU, and the company claims that this is just the beginning, with more powerful GPUs coming soon.

The A350M GPU has six Xe-cores and six ray-tracing units, whereas, the A370M GPU comes with eight Xe-cores and eight ray-tracing units. Both the new GPUs are meant for ultraportable devices and come with a power range of 25W to 50W. These are not meant for gaming laptops and PCs. If you are looking for dedicated gaming GPUs, then you will have to wait for the Arc 5 and Arc 7 GPUs, both of which will offer significantly more graphics cores, ray-tracing units, memory, and power. The company claims that these GPUs will arrive later this year in early summer.

People looking for dedicated Arc graphics for PCs will have to wait a bit more, with add-in-cards launching later this summer. Workstation cards will arrive sometime in Q3, 2022.

First Arc GPUs will be made available with the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro, with more laptops to follow from major brands including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, and more. The company claims that Arc powered laptops will be made available for as low as $899 (approximately Rs 68,111).

Take note, the new Arc GPUs do not come with the company’s XeSS AI-powered super-sampling system for upscaling games to a higher resolution in real-time. The company has stated that this will be made available later this year.

As of now, it is not known how the new Arc GPUs perform, as Intel did not put out any competing benchmarks. We only know that it is better than the company’s integrated Xe graphics.

According to the numbers provided by Intel, the new Arc 3 GPUs beat its Iris Xe integrated graphics in both gaming and creative tasks. However, at the same time take up as much power as its CPUs.

The new Arc GPUs come with full AV1 hardware acceleration support, which will provide faster video encoding in a variety of apps. They will also include the Deep Link technology, which will optimize power-sharing between the stack of Intel processors and graphics cards. Deep Link will also allow PCs to harness both the integrated and discrete GPUs simultaneously.

Along with the GPUs, the company also launched a new Arc Control app, which will handle game driver updates, tweak and monitor performance, stream gameplay, and more. It also brings in in-game overlays.

The post Intel launches first Arc GPUs, plan to sell least powerful ones first appeared first on BGR India.