We’ve been waiting with bated breath for the launch of Intel’s discrete graphics card lineup, and the time has finally come. At the very least, when it comes to gaming computers. The Arc GPU launch event will take place on the 30th of March at 8 a.m. Pacific time, according to a holding page on the official Intel website. For the time being, this event will only showcase laptop GPUs, but it represents the beginning of a new era for Intel hardware.
The GPUs that we expect to see demonstrated will most likely be similar to the DG2 Arc laptop specifications that we saw leaked back in January, and thankfully we now have a little more clarity. Prior to the debut of the Visual Compute Group, VideoCardz discovered a blog post in which Lisa Pearce, Vice President and General Manager for the Visual Compute Group, responded to a few questions.
According to the blog post, the A370M will be the first Intel Arc discrete GPU to hit the market in the near future. It claims to provide an improvement of up to two times that of an integrated card while maintaining the same overall form factor of the system as before. Intel attributes part of the improvements to its Deep Link technology, and the company expects even improved performance in the future.
The average frame rate of Metro Exodus at 1080p on medium was used to calculate the claimed 2x performance increase. You’d expect greater performance in any game if you used discrete graphics rather than integrated graphics.
But we’re presuming that at medium settings, other capabilities such as ray tracing were not enabled, which is likely the case. Even said, more power in the same size factor is definitely something we would like to see from technology, particularly in our gaming laptops and other portable devices.
Nonetheless, many of us are looking forward to seeing what Intel has in store for its desktop GPU lineup as a whole. We expect to hear more about these in a few months, which is a little later than we had hoped for at the time. According to leaks, the cards will be extremely powerful and may even be able to compete with the big dogs like AMD and Nvidia.
