The Intel Arc graphics card is still a little while far away, the possibility of landing in Q1 2022, but we begin to see all kinds of leaks and rumors about the upcoming chips. And – Well, regardless of whether they are legit – this is not like the usual run-up for graphic launches.
Recently, we have seen two contradictory rumors about the Top-End GPU in the Intel Arc stack, which is rumored as part of 512 UE (execution unit). Leaker @ Greymon55 apparently sees an internal slide from Intel which shows the high-end intel section will target RTX 3070, as seen by hotardware.
Meanwhile, the leaking geekbench produces an Intel GPU PEGS without a name with 512 computing units with a much lower performance than what RTX 3070 is able to do, as indicated by our friends on the hardware Tom. And for the next few months, it will only be the way to go.
This is still early
Intel Arc does not come out of thin air. We have heard rumbles about Intel launching a full graphics card to take people like Nvidia and AMD Radeon for years now, and have recently seen a glimpse of DG1 Intel XE which is powered at CES 2020.
And on the show, when we first saw this GPU in action, it turned on the laptop locked behind a giant glass box, struggling to run Destiny 2 – but even it was impressive, given how early the GPU was in development. Fast forward to now, and the Intel Xe LP graphics now turn on the desktop integrated laptop and graphics.
It is very unlikely that the benchmarks we see at this time in any way will reflect what any graphics card based on this architecture will be done.
However…
Even if the superior Alchemist GPU Intel failed to match the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, it was not too important, and it was because not many people were able to pay the GPU at that level – especially by the way the graphics card was valued now.
Looking back at the steam hardware survey, the most powerful graphics card in the top 10 GPUs is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super, and even the GPU only contributed 2.10% of Steam users. And, the top ten GPUs redeemed 47.04% of all steam users.
And so reasonable that by running the first fan graphics card, Intel will go for the mainstream market, where it can stand up to take the most market share of AMD and Nvidia. Because, while the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 and the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is a very powerful graphics card and we love them – both the green team and the red team are truly forgotten about the budget segment.
Again, even though it was almost a year since Nvidia and AMD had released the current generation GPU lineup, we still don’t have anything for gamers with a limited budget. And that means that Intel has a clear market segment basically overlooked at this time.
Both the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 1650 Super or the AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT has been replaced, which leaves a larggap. So, while it might be disappointing if Intel doesn’t have something to take RTX 3080, it doesn’t make sense for the company to go after the top class now – but that doesn’t mean it won’t.
Rmember that during the Intel architecture day, Intel revealed the code name for four generations of the XE ARC graphics processor. So, while we might not see RTX 3080 competitors (or even RTX 3070) immediately, it can’t be Intel will never challenge the Top-End Stack of AMD or NVIDIA products. Now we just have to wait and see what happens.