#intel #Laptop #arc #videocart # video cards # Intel

Intel officially introduced Arc A discrete graphics accelerators, which are focused on using laptops. In the model range - five representatives, the first video cards are already available in serial laptops. As for Arc A video cards for desktop computers and workstations, they will come out later this year.

ARC A graphic accelerators presented today are based on XE HPG architecture and are focused on a wide range of modern mobile systems. The family includes three series of video cards: Arc 3, Arc 5 and Arc 7. Each series characterized in one or another level of productivity may consist of several models of discrete video cards.

The aircraft of the younger series Intel Arc 3 is aimed at Gayming in a 1080p resolution. These include A350M for ultra-thin laptops and A370M for more productive thin and lung systems. Intel promises that A370M is able to provide the frame rate of 60 FPS in modern games with medium quality settings and more than 90 FPS in competitive cybersport games.

In its own tests, Intel compares the Arc A370M video card with built-in IRIS XE graphics with 96 by the performing devices from the Alder Lake processors, and the novelty looks at one and a half or two times faster. This can be interpreted that the ARC 3 series cards for gaming performance are comparable to integrated Ryzen 6000 mobile processors (Rembrandt).

The Arc A350M video card received 6 XE nuclei, 6 ray tracing blocks and 4 GB 64-bit GDDR6 memory. A more speed card A370M has 8 XE-nuclei and ray tracing blocks, but the same volume of video memory. These cards are already supplied by laptop manufacturers and are available in finished products.

ARC 5 and ARC 7 series will come out a little later and will get higher performance. The Arc A550M video card will have 16 xE-nuclei and ray tracing blocks, as well as 8 GB 128 bits GDDR6. The ARC A730M model will receive 24 XE-kernels and a trace block plus 12 GB of 192-bit video memory. And the flagship A770M will have 32 kernels and RT blocks and 16 GB 256-bit GDDR6. Among other things, the video cards varies and power consumption: while the younger ARC 3 options consume from 25 to 50 W, the older ARC 7 have a thermal package from in the range of 80-150 W.

Each graphical processor ARC supports up to four HDMI 2.0B and DisplayPort 1.4A, which are capable of working with panels and 4K / 120 Hz class monitors or 8K / 60 Hz. Also, the mediator video cards Intel is capable of carrying out hardware decoding 8K60 12-bit HDR-video stream and video stream coding with a resolution up to 8K 10-bit HDR. At the same time, all modern codecs are supported, including not only VP9, ​​AVC and HEVC, but also the most progressive AV1 (including when encoding). According to Intel, the AV1 hardware encoding in Arc video cards is 50 times faster than software coding.

All Intel Arc video cards support XE Super Samples (XESS) AI scaling technology. This technology itself, similar to NVIDIA DLSS, will be represented in the summer. It is expected that at the time of launching, its support will be implemented in more than 20 games. Intel also promises to open XESS SDK and the necessary tools for simply implementing the scaling by all the wishing developers.

Another unique property of Arc A video cards is Deep Link technology. Due to it, the resources of the discrete graphics accelerator can be combined with blocks existing in the processor integrated GPU, to solve a single task. The total power of such a tandem increases up to 30%, but at the moment the technology is applicable only for computational problems (AI and video transcoding).

Laptops with Arc 3 video cards are already available for pre-order - their cost begins with $ 900. The first laptop with a discrete graphics card Intel Arc became Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro, but the list of partners who choose Intel's discrete video cards for their solutions is very wide and includes names such as Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, and so on.

Mobile video cards of the Arc 5 and Arc 7 series will appear in finished products at the beginning of summer.