Intel released more information on its upcoming Arc series of gaming graphics cards, such as detailing the underlying architecture of the products.
The Arc line was announced earlier this week, with details about the GPUs shared in a video presentation at the Architecture Day 2021 event held Friday. According to ArsTechnica, the Arc series is set to compete against Nvidia’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon graphics cards.
The upcoming GPUs are based on Xe-HPG architecture that will feature “hardware-based ray tracing” and support DirectX12 Ultimate. The architecture and features allow the hardware to access more of its own resources to portray higher-quality graphics.
The GPUs also will include variable-rate shading for better performance efficiency and mesh shading for higher-quality textures on game models.
The first in the line goes by code name Alchemist, which will release in early 2022. The rest of the line will release subsequently, each with an improvement in power.
The next GPU, code-named Battlemage, will be made on Xe2-HPG architecture. The third GPU will be built on Xe3-HPG architecture, and the final Arc series graphics card will have a yet-unnamed architecture; presumably Xe4-HPG.
Intel will not be constructing the Arc series in-house, but instead pass the manufacturing over to TSMC, a semiconductor manufacturer based in Taiwan.
Stuart Pann, senior vice president of the company’s corporate planning group, hinted in an accompanying press release that Intel lacks the necessary equipment to build the GPUs, and the foundries selected to build them will offer specific benefits to the product.
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