We still don’t really know what to expect from Intel’s upcoming Arc Alchemist desktop graphics cards. But a leak from Intel itself can tell us more.
The laptop variants of the Intel Arc Alchemist graphics cards are already available in the first models. However, rumours still surround the dedicated graphics cards for desktop PCs. These are to appear in the summer quarter of 2022, but Intel is holding back on details.
Now, however, Intel has inadvertently revealed some performance features of one of the upcoming Intel Arc desktop graphics cards. You can see them in the presentation video (via 3D Center) of Intel’s new control centre Intel Arc Control. Here you can see the performance data of the graphics cards in real time, optimise settings for games, download new drivers and more.
In this video we also see the key data of a previously unreleased graphics card in the background while the presenter introduces the software. On display is a GPU with a power consumption of 175 watts GPU power, a clock speed of 2,250 megahertz and a memory clock of 1,093 megahertz.
The power consumption is given in GPU power, what exactly Intel means by this we don’t know. But we suspect that this is the power consumption for the chip alone, not the whole card. 3D Center thus estimates the total power consumption at 210 to 230 watts, which points to the DG2-512, the top model of Intel’s line-up.
Together with the clock speed of 2,250 megahertz and the memory clock, some performance data can be derived for the card. With a clock speed of 1,093 MHz, the memory could reach a transfer rate of 17.5 Gbps, which would put it between AMD’s RX 6700 XT and Nvidia’s RTX 3070 Ti.
If we combine this with the GPU clock rate of 2,250 MHz, we can calculate the raw performance of the card. However, we do not know whether the clock is the boost clock, i.e. the maximum possible clock, or the base clock. In both cases, however, we end up between the cards mentioned above.
The raw FP32 performance of the Intel card is accordingly around 18.4 teraflops, while the RX 6700 XT operates at 12.8 teraflops and the RTX 3070 Ti at 21.8 teraflops. This certainly underlines previous rumours that predict performance on par with the RTX 3070 for the top model.
However, it is always difficult to compare the raw performance of graphics cards across different architectures and manufacturers, as they often have very different efficiencies. So we can’t conclude the actual performance in games from this, precisely because we don’t have any experience with Intel’s desktop GPUs yet.
Intel Arc Contol looks promising at first glance
The control panel shown in the video, Intel Arc Control looks promising. Here you can download the latest drivers and set whether they should be automatically loaded and installed or not. If you want to, you can also set a time for this.
You can also have the performance data of your graphics card displayed in real time as an overlay in the game. Arc Control recognises which games you have installed and you can make some settings in the software, similar to Nvidia’s Geforce Experience. Intel explains all the features in the video:
Meanwhile, we don’t really know what to make of Intel’s new graphics cards yet. After Intel’s big presentation, we could be in for a flop with the new GPUs:
I had high hopes for Intel’s GPUs, but now I fear a flop
What do you think of Intel’s graphics cards? Will they be real competition for AMD and Nvidia or will we actually get a flop? Your opinion is needed.
