Intel has finally unveiled its first foray into the GPU market with the arrival of its Arc A-series GPUs specifically for laptops. All of the GPUs in the Intel Arc video card series—that’s the Arc 3, Arc 5, and Arc 7—will support DirectX 12 with Direct Storage capabilities and promise to have at least twice the processing power of Intel’s most recent graphics products.
What are the release dates for the Intel Arc video cards?
According to the nearly 20-minute Intel presentation, the lower-end, entry-level Intel Arc 3 is already available, but the high-performance Intel Arc 5 and 7 meant for high-end gamers have a release date for later this year at around Q3 2022. At the very least, Intel seems right on track with prior previews and announcements for the release dates of its Arc video cards.
The Intel Arc 3 series, which includes the A350M and A370M, is already included in several laptops like the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro, with other manufacturers like Lenovo and ASI announcing their models later. With a lower number of Xe-cores and ray-tracing units compared to the Arc 5 and Arc 7, they are designed for less intensive gaming and content creation.
The Intel Arc 5 and 7 series, however, won’t be available until early summer this year. This release date also includes Intel’s XeSS super-sampling system which makes it easier for the GPU to upscale games dynamically. However, the presentation doesn’t reveal any comparisons of Intel’s Arc GPUs to the current offerings by AMD, Nvidia, or Apple.
Desktop versions of the Arc GPUs are slated for Q2 2022 as well, with workstation variants arriving the following quarter. A service called “Project Endgame” is also slated for sometime later this year, though its current description is rather vague as “an always-accessible, low-latency computing experience.” By the language, it sounds like a competitor to the GeForce Now cloud-gaming service, specifically as a rival to the GeForce Now RTX 3080 service priced at $19.99 per month.
In other news, our review for Kirby and the Forgotten Land says that it “neither sucks nor blows,” and Fortnite’s No Build mode has been made a permanent option.
