It was one of the most anticipated announcements in the world of technology in recent times. Finally, Intel has jumped to the fore and has decided to enter a competition that dominate with an iron fist between AMD and Nvidia. The graphics card market has a new entrant with the arrival of Arc A-Series.
However, the presentation has been more discreet than we expected. The company has given a first approximation of its products with the line for notebook systems with Arc 4 graphics for Intel Evo systems based on Arc A350M and A370M. The possibilities offered by these GPUs is 60FPS at 1080p in a large number of titles.
Beyond the lowest range, we have been able to see details about the upper lines Arc 5 and Arc 7. These will have more Xe cores, more ray tracing units and more GDDR6 memory. While the Arc 3 laptops can already start to be reserved, we will have to wait for the other two until early summer. It will be sometime in the next season when graphics cards for desktop PCs arrive at our homes.
Of course, all of them will have compatibility with DirectX 12 Ultimate, which guarantees the integration of ray tracing and the future arrival of XeSS, the clear competitor of Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR. It will allow us to run works at 4K resolution with performance similar to what we would have with native 1080p.
A highlight of the presentation is how the Arc A-Series will take advantage of different technologies. One of them is Intel’s own Xe High Performance Graphics microarchitecture, designed specifically for perform in the gaming market and for content creators. It is committed to the XMX cores that increase the computing capacity by 16 times to perform several tasks at the same time.
On the other hand, it seeks to support hardware encoding and decoding for AV1 codec. The Xe display engine enables support for HDR displays, including Display Port 2.0 10G for 4K at 120Hz and without compression. We also find Intel Deep Link, allowing full collaboration between the GPU and the CPU. This increases performance by directing the workload to the specific component as needed.