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Intel Arc

Release date	March 30, 2022 (2022-03-30)
Manufactured by	TSMC
Designed by	Intel
Marketed by	Intel
Codenames	Alchemist Battlemage Celestial Druid
Architecture	Intel Xe
Cores	Up to 32 Xe cores
Transistors	Up to 21.7 billion
Fabrication process	TSMC N5 TSMC N6
Cards
Entry-level	Arc 3
Mid-range	Arc 5
High-end	Arc 7
API support
DirectX	Direct3D 12.0 Ultimate (feature level 12_2) Shader Model 6.7
OpenCL	OpenCL 3.0
OpenGL	OpenGL 4.6
Vulkan	Vulkan 1.3
History
Predecessor	i740 Intel Iris Xe

Intel Arc is a brand of graphics processing units designed by Intel. These are discrete GPUs mostly marketed for the high-margin gaming PC market. The brand also covers Intel's consumer graphics software and services.

Arc competes with Nvidia's GeForce and AMD's Radeon lines. The Arc-A series for laptops was launched on March 30, 2022, with the A750 and A770 both released in Q3 2022. Intel missed their initial Q2 2022 release target, with most discrete Arc GPUs not launching until October 2022.

In addition a new series of arc cards (the b series) are scheduled to release in December 2024 through January 2025, today (December 17th 2024) only the b580 is released with a couple more cards on the horizon.

Intel officially launched the Arc Pro workstation GPUs on August 8, 2022.

Intel officially launched the 2nd generation Battlemage GPUs on December 3rd, 2024.

Etymology

According to Intel, the brand is named after the concept of story arcs found in video games. Each generation of Arc is named after character classes sorted by each letter of the Latin alphabet in ascending order. They begin with A, then B, then C, and so on. The first generation is named Alchemist, while Battlemage, Celestial and Druid are the respective names for the second, third and fourth Arc generations.

Graphics processor generations

Alchemist

Developed under the previous codename "DG2", the first generation of Intel Arc GPUs (codenamed "Alchemist") released on March 30, 2022. It comes in both add-on desktop card and laptop form factors. TSMC manufactures the die, using their N6 process.

Alchemist uses the Intel Xe GPU architecture, or more specifically, the Xe-HPG variant. Alchemist supports hardware-based ray tracing, XeSS or supersampling based on neural networks (similar to Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR), and DirectX 12 Ultimate. Also supported are DisplayPort 2.0 and overclocking. AV1 fixed-function hardware encoder is included in Alchemist GPUs as part of the Intel Quick Sync Video core.

Intel confirmed ASTC support has been removed from hardware starting with Alchemist and future Arc GPU microarchitectures will also not support it.

Arc Alchemist does not support SR-IOV or Direct3D 9 natively, instead falling back on the D3D9On12 wrapper which translates Direct3D 9 calls to their Direct3D 12 equivalents.

Arc support OpenCL 3.0 for example, this GPU can work in the grid World Community Grid.

Display connections: DisplayPort 2.0 (40 Gbit/s bandwidth) and HDMI 2.1

Desktop

• v
• t
• e

1. In OpenCL 3.0, OpenCL 1.2 functionality has become a mandatory baseline, while all OpenCL 2.x and OpenCL 3.0 features were made optional.
2. Shading cores (ALU): texture mapping units (TMU): render output units (ROP): ray tracing units
      (tensor cores (XMX): execution units: render slices)
3. Boost values (if available) are stated below the base value in italic.

Mobile

• v
• t
• e

1. Shading cores (ALU): texture mapping units (TMU): render output units (ROP): ray tracing units
      (tensor cores (XMX): execution units: render slices)
2. Texture fillrate is calculated as the number of texture mapping units (TMUs) multiplied by the base (or boost) core clock speed.
3. Boost values (if available) are stated below the base value in italic.
4. Pixel fillrate is calculated as the lowest of three numbers: number of ROPs multiplied by the base core clock speed, number of rasterizers multiplied by the number of fragments they can generate per rasterizer multiplied by the base core clock speed, and the number of streaming multiprocessors multiplied by the number of fragments per clock that they can output multiplied by the base clock rate.

Workstation

• v
• t
• e

1. Shading cores (ALU): texture mapping units (TMU): render output units (ROP): ray tracing units
      (tensor cores (XMX): execution Units: render slices)
2. Boost values (if available) are stated below the base value in italic.
3. Pixel fillrate is calculated as the lowest of three numbers: number of ROPs multiplied by the base core clock speed, number of rasterizers multiplied by the number of fragments they can generate per rasterizer multiplied by the base core clock speed, and the number of streaming multiprocessors multiplied by the number of fragments per clock that they can output multiplied by the base clock rate.
4. Texture fillrate is calculated as the number of texture mapping units (TMUs) multiplied by the base (or boost) core clock speed.

Battlemage

Battlemage (X2) is the second generation X architecture that debuted with its low power variant in Lunar Lake mobile processors that released in September 2024. On December 3, 2024, Intel announced two Arc B-Series desktop graphics cards based on the X2-HPG graphics architecture.

1. Pixel fillrate is calculated as the number of render output units (ROPs) multiplied by the base (or boost) core clock speed.
2. Texture fillrate is calculated as the number of texture mapping units (TMUs) multiplied by the base (or boost) core clock speed.
3. X2-HPG Cores (X Vector Engines)
   Unified Shaders : Texture Mapping Units : Render Output Units : Ray Tracing Cores : XMX Cores
4. Core boost values (if available) are stated below the base value in italics.

Future generations

Intel also revealed future generations of Intel Arc GPUs under development: Celestial (X3), and Druid (X4).

Intel revealed that Meteor Lake and later generations of CPU SoCs uses an Intel Arc Tile GPU.

Intel XeSS

Intel XeSS is a real-time deep learning image upsampling technology developed primarily for use in video games as a competitor to Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR technologies. Additionally, XeSS is not restricted to Arc graphics cards. It utilizes XMX instructions exclusive to Arc graphics cards, but will fall back to utilizing DP4a instructions on competing GPUs that have support for DP4a instructions. XeSS is trained with 64 samples per pixel as opposed to Nvidia DLSS's 16 samples per pixel (16K reference images).

1. The algorithm does not necessarily need to be implemented using these presets; it is possible for the implementer to define custom input and output resolutions.
2. The linear scale factor used for upsampling the input resolution to the output resolution. For example, a scene rendered at 540p with a 2.00× scale factor would have an output resolution of 1080p.
3. The linear render scale, compared to the output resolution, that the technology uses to render scenes internally before upsampling. For example, a 1080p scene with a 50% render scale would have an internal resolution of 540p.

Issues

Drivers

Performance on Intel Arc GPUs has suffered from poor driver support, particularly at launch. An investigation by Gamers Nexus discovered 43 known driver issues with Arc GPUs, prompting a response and acknowledgement of the issues from Intel. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger also blamed driver problems as a reason for Arc's delayed launch. A beta driver from October 2022 accidentally reduced the memory clock by 9% on the Arc A770 from 2187 MHz to 2000 MHz, resulting in a 17% reduction in memory bandwidth. This particular issue was later fixed. Intel provides an open source driver for Linux.

DirectX 9 compatibility

As of the Alchemist generation, Arc only includes direct hardware support for the DirectX 11 & 12 and Vulkan graphics APIs, with the older DirectX 9 & 10 and OpenGL APIs being supported via a real-time compatibility layer built into Intel's graphics driver. As a result, Alchemist GPUs perform noticeably worse than competing Nvidia and AMD GPUs in software that can only use these older APIs, including multiple DirectX 9-based esports games such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, League of Legends and StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. There is also a performance gap between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12.

A December 2022 driver update improved Arc compatibility and performance with DirectX 9-based games. According to Intel, the driver update made Arc GPUs up to 1.8x faster in DirectX 9 games. A February 2023 driver update further improved Arc's performance on DirectX 9-based games.

Legacy BIOS compatibility

Intel Arc requires a UEFI BIOS with resizable BAR support for optimal performance.

Footnotes

1. In OpenCL 3.0, OpenCL 1.2 functionality has become a mandatory baseline, while all OpenCL 2.x and OpenCL 3.0 features were made optional.

References

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External links

• Official website
• Intel Graphics Performance Analyzers 2024.1

• Computer-related introductions in 2022
• Graphics processing units
• Graphics cards
• Intel graphics