Intel Arc is a brand of graphics processing units (GPUs) developed by Intel, representing the company’s line of for gaming, content creation, and professional applications. Arc GPUs are designed by Intel and manufactured under contract by TSMC. The brand also includes supporting graphics software and driver technologies, and is sold alongside Intel Graphics Technology, the company's line of integrated graphics processors, found in most of its processors.
Intel Arc competes with Nvidia's GeForce and AMD's Radeon products.
The Arc Pro series for workstation use was introduced in August 2022,
Etymology
According to Intel, the brand is named after the concept of
found in video games.
Each generation of Arc is named after
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.
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
Arc support OpenCL 3.0 for example, this GPU can work in the Grid computing World Community Grid.
Display connections: DisplayPort 2.0 (40 Gbit/s bandwidth) and HDMI 2.1
Desktop
Mobile
Workstation
Battlemage
Battlemage (X
e2) is the second-generation X
e 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 X
e2-HPG graphics architecture.
Desktop
Workstation
Future generations
Intel also revealed future generations of Intel Arc GPUs under development: Celestial (X
e3), and Druid (X
e4).
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
Machine learning image
image scaling 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).
+ Standard XeSS quality presets |
| Native Anti-Aliasing(since 1.3) | 1.00x(since 1.3) | 100%
! colspan="2" rowspan="2" | N/A |
| Ultra Quality Plus(since 1.3) | 1.30x(since 1.3) | 77.0% |
| Ultra Quality | 1.50×(since 1.3) | 66.7% | 1.30x | 77.0% |
| Quality | 1.70×(since 1.3) | 58.8% | 1.50x | 66.7% |
| Balanced | 2.00×(since 1.3) | 50.0% | 1.70x | 58.8% |
| Performance | 2.30×(since 1.3) | 43.5% | 2.00x | 50.0% |
| Ultra Performance(since 1.3) | 3.00×(since 1.3) | 33.3%
! colspan="2" | N/A |
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 2187MHz to 2000MHz, 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
device 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
, League of Legends and .
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.
Legacy BIOS compatibility
Intel Arc requires a
UEFI BIOS with resizable BAR support for optimal performance.
UEFI Class 1 and Class 2 BIOS are not supported by Intel Arc.
Footnotes
External links
