Tag: Graphics Cards

Intel’s Arc GPUs won’t just be for PC gamers. The company is expanding the graphics line to also target professional users, such as 3D artists and architects.

The company is doing so through a new “Arc Pro A-series” range of GPUs, which Intel announced on Monday. They’re slated to arrive for both desktop and laptop workstations, which will put them head-to-head with rival GPUs from Nvidia and AMD.

To target laptops, Intel is preparing the Arc Pro A30M GPU. For desktops, the company is planning the A40, a single-slot graphics card, and the A50, a dual-slot card. Both will be meant for “small-form factor” PCs, suggesting they’ll operate as lower-end GPUs.

Intel’s announcement was mum on details, including specs, pricing, and an exact launch date. But the Pro series will feature “built-in ray tracing hardware, machine learning capabilities, and industry-first AV1 hardware encoding acceleration,” the company said.

Intel added that the first Arc Pro A-series GPUs will arrive sometime later this year through “leading mobile and desktop ecosystem partners.” So it sounds like the desktop Arc Pro graphics cards will only be available inside pre-built workstation PCs.

The current challenge facing Intel’s Arc series has been limited product availability. The company has been slow to launch the gaming-focused Arc GPUs outside Asia amid rumors of sagging support from third-party vendors. The other issue has been optimizing the Arc GPUs to play well with older PC games.

That said, Intel insists that the first Arc desktop GPUs will launch globally before the end of Q3. In the meantime, the company plans on demoing the first Arc Pro A-series GPUs later today during SIGGRAPH, the annual computers graphics conference, in Vancouver, Canada.

The company also noted that Intel Arc Pro GPUs are “targeting certifications with leading professional software applications within the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), and design and manufacturing (D&M) industries.”

If you decide to buy Intel’s upcoming Arc graphics cards, brace yourself for some mediocre performance when it comes to running older PC games.

On Thursday, Intel admitted the Arc GPUs will struggle to produce high frame rates for some PC titles built with the older DirectX11 and DirectX9 APIs from Microsoft. “On Some DX11 titles, we’re going to do great, but other DX 11 titles are not going to do great,” Intel Graphics Fellow Tom Petersen says in a video the company posted on Thursday.

The reason is due to the older DirectX11 API relying on Microsoft and the GPU driver to handle the game’s memory management. According to Petersen, Intel essentially still needs time to optimize its graphics cards with a variety of older games that were originally designed with GPU hardware from Nvidia and AMD in mind.

“We have to do a really good job of behavior that the game developers have come to expect when they’re using Nvidia hardware,” Petersen adds. “The truth is our card works very differently from Nvidia, so we now kind of have to start tuning all of our DX11 work to match what older titles have expected.”

On the plus side, Intel says the Arc GPUs have been optimized for games running on the newer DirectX12 and Vulcan APIs, both of which originally arrived about seven years ago. According to Petersen, the programming “layer” to the APIs “is much thinner,” and offloads the memory management to the game engine itself.

Intel also discussed the DX11 API issued last month in a video with Linus Tech Tips. In the clip, an Intel Arc A770, the company’s most powerful GPU in the line, runs Shadow of the Tomb Raider at about 80fps while using DX12. However, the performance drops to 40fps when rendering the game using DX11.

In a blog post on Thursday, Intel adds: “DX12 and Vulkan are modern ‘low-level APIs,’ with closer communication between the game and the GPU. DX11, DX9, and other legacy APIs require less developer resource management which means we’ve got more work to do in drivers.” (AMD’s own RDNA2 cards have also suffered similar problems with DX11 games too.)

The API issue certainly dampens the appeal of the Arc desktop GPUs, which are slated to launch later this quarter. PC builders looking for a reliable, high-performing graphics card may end up sticking with Nvidia and AMD, especially with the GPU shortage seemingly over. But Intel says it’s steadily working to optimize the graphics technology for all games. “It’s just going to be a labor of love forever making DX11 titles better and better and better,” Petersen says.