We've been hearing a lot about Intel's Arc Alchemist GPUs in the last few months. Now the company has revealed its first discrete graphics cards are set to launch in a number of thin and light laptops. With more powerful Intel Arc GPUs are also on the horizon for desktops later this year. 

Intel says that the Intel Arc A-Series is its "next big milestone" for discrete graphics and will offer high performance for gamers, creators and more. 

The first wave of Intel Arc A-Series graphics is made up of Arc 3 in two initial offerings with the following specs:

  • A370M with 8 Xe-cores, 8 Ray Tracing Units, 4GB GDDR6
  • A350M with 6 Xe-cores, 6 Ray Tracing Units, 4GB GDDR6

The claim is that these discrete GPUs will deliver 60FPS at 1080p for a large number of games and even higher FPS on competitive games like Rocket League, Valorant, GTA V and CS:GO. There's also "an ever expanding list" of titles to set to deliver the best experience on portable laptops. 

It looks like Intel is planning to give Nvidia and AMD a fight too. With Intel Arc graphics the company says it will be offering industry-leading features such as DirectX 12 Ultimate support, hardware-accelerated Ray Tracing, Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) AI-driven upscaling technology and Intel Deep Link technology.  That deep link technology, in particular, is interesting because it is set to harness the full power of your system when paired with a compatible Intel CPU.  

It essentially provides a bridge between CPU and GPU. Intelligently sharing power across the platform to improve performance. This works with Dynamic Power Share and Hyper Compute. This means if you have an Intel CPU and Intel ARC GPU then you should get better performance.

Xe Super Sampling is also interesting as it's essentially a competitor to Nvidia DLSS. Arriving later this summer, Xe Super Sampling will offer high-performance AI accelerated upscaling. Using artificial intelligence to enhance the visuals of your game while keeping frame rates high. Intel says it will work with 20 games at launch, but that list is expected to grow. 

Alongside these technologies, Arc also offers full AV1 hardware acceleration. This is said to give 50x faster acceleration in apps like Adobe Premiere Pro, XSplit, DaVinci Resolve and more. This is shown to give clearer images when game streaming via XSplit and apparently delivers smoother streaming over the same bandwidth. 

Meanwhile, XMX is said to work well with AI upscaling in programs other than games - in something like Topaz Labs where AI can upscale video and improve even grainy footage. 

So Intel Arc's A-Series is certainly promising a lot. 

Later this year Intel is set to launch more versions of Arc. These include both Arc 3 and Arc 7 which will be desktop graphics cards with serious specs:

  • Arc 5 - A550M with 16 Xe-cores, 16 Ray Tracing Units, 8GB GDDR6
  • Arc 7 - A730M with 24 Xe-cores, 24 Ray Tracing Units, 12GB GDDR6
  • Arc 7 - A550M with 32 Xe-cores, 32 Ray Tracing Units, 16GB GDDR6

In the meantime, the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro, the first laptop with an Intel Arc 3 GPU is available to pre-order. More devices will also follow from Asus, HP, Lenovo, Acer and more.