Intel has finally launched its first Arc A-series GPU for laptops with support for DirectX 12. They come with twice the power of the company’s integrated XE graphics and feature dedicated ray-tracing hardware. The A-series is the least powerful Arc 3 series GPU, and the company claims this is just the beginning, with more powerful GPUs coming soon.
The A350M GPU has six Xe-cores and six ray-tracing units, whereas, the A370M GPU comes with eight Xe-cores and eight ray-tracing units. Both the new GPUs are meant for ultraportable devices and come with a power range of 25W to 50W. These are not for gaming laptops and PCs. If you’re looking for dedicated gaming GPUs, you’ll have to wait for the Arc 5 and Arc 7 GPUs, both of which offer significantly more graphics cores, ray-tracing units, memory, and power. The company claims that these GPUs will arrive at the beginning of summer later this year.
Those looking for dedicated Arc graphics for PC will have to wait a bit longer, with the add-in-card launching later this summer. Workstation cards will arrive sometime in Q3, 2022.
The First Arc GPU will be made available with the Samsung Galaxy Book 2 Pro, which will be powered by laptops from leading brands such as Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI and others. The company claims that the Arc Power laptop will be made available for as low as $899 (approximately Rs 68,111).
Of note, the new Arc GPUs don’t come with the company’s XESS AI-powered super-sampling system, which upgrades games to higher resolutions in real-time. The company has said that it will be made available by the end of this year.
As of now, it is not known how the new Arc GPUs perform, as Intel did not set any competitive benchmarks. All we know is that it’s better than the company’s integrated Xe graphics.
According to numbers provided by Intel, the new Arc 3 GPU beat its Iris XE integrated graphics in both gaming and creative tasks. However, it takes as much power as its CPU at the same time.
The new Arc GPUs come with full AV1 hardware acceleration support, which will provide faster video encoding across a wide variety of apps. These will also include Deep Link technology, which optimizes power-sharing between a stack of Intel processors and graphics cards. Deep Link will allow PCs to use both integrated and discrete GPUs simultaneously.
Along with the GPU, the company also launched a new Arc Control app that will handle game driver updates, tweaks, and monitor performance, stream gameplay, and more. It also brings in-game overlays.
Intel launches first Arc GPU, plans to sell the least powerful first appeared on BGR India.
