With bated breath we've awaited the launch of Intel's discrete graphics card range, and now it's finally around the corner. At least for gaming laptops. A holding page on the official Intel website is teasing the Arc GPU (opens in new tab) launch event for the 30th of March at 8 AM pacific time. This event will only feature laptop GPUs for now, but it's still the start of a new future for Intel hardware.
The GPUs we expect to see shown off will likely be similar to the DG2 Arc laptop specs we saw leaked (opens in new tab) a back in January and thankfully we have a bit more clarification. VideoCardz (opens in new tab) spotted a blog post (opens in new tab) in which Lisa Pearce, Vice President and General Manager for the Visual Compute Group answered a few questions ahead of the launch.
According to the post, the first Intel Arc discrete GPU coming to the market will be the A370M. It's boasting an improvement of up to 2x that of an integrated card without changing the overall form factor of the machine. Intel credits its Deep Link technologies for some of the improvements, and promises better performance in the future.
The 2x performance claim was arrived at by using the average FPS of Metro Exodus at 1080 on medium. You'd definitely expect better performance in any game with a discrete over integrated graphics but we're assuming at medium settings extra features like ray tracing probably weren't turned on. Still, more power in the same form factor is definitely what we like to see from technology, especially in our gaming laptops.
Still, many of us are hoping to see what Intel plans to offer to the desktop range of GPUs as well. We are expecting to hear more on these in a few months time, which is a bit later than we were hoping (opens in new tab). Leaks are suggesting powerful cards that may even compete with the big dogs like AMD and Nvidia (opens in new tab).
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