We have been waiting with bated breath to release the line of discrete graphics cards from Intel, and here it is, finally, just around the corner. The wait page on Intel’s official website lists the Arc GPU launch event on March 30 at 8:00 AM PT. This event will only showcase laptop GPUs for now, but it’s still the start of a new future for Intel hardware. At least for gaming laptops.
The GPUs we expect to see will most likely be similar to the specs of the DG2 Arc laptops leaked in January, and thankfully we have a bit more clarification. Video cards noticed a Blog post in which Lisa Pierce, Vice President and General Manager of the Visual Compute Group, answered a few pre-launch questions.
Intel thanks its Deep Link technologies for some upgrades and promises better performance in the future. According to the announcement, the first discrete Intel Arc GPU to hit the market will be the A370M. It boasts a 2X improvement over the integrated card without changing the overall form factor of the machine.
The 2x performance claim was achieved using Metro Exodus’ average FPS of 1080 on the mid-range. You expect better performance in any game with discrete graphics versus integrated graphics, but we’re guessing that extra features like ray tracing were probably not enabled at medium settings. That said, more power in the same form factor is something we like to see in technology, especially in our gaming laptops.
However, many of us are looking forward to seeing what Intel plans to bring to the desktop GPU lineup. The leaks suggest potent cards competing with big dogs like AMD and Nvidia. We expect to hear more about this in a few months, which is a little later than we had hoped.
