Intel has shed more light on the roadmap for its Arc gaming GPUs, including more clarity about when consumers can expect to get their hands on them. As previously announced, the GPUs will debut in laptops from Intel’s OEM partners this quarter, presumably alongside 12th-gen Alder Lake CPUs.
However, desktop gamers will need to wait a little longer before they can plug Arc GPUs into their rigs. Intel says those graphics cards will ship in Q2. It previously said those would arrive in Q1 as well. As for add-in GPUs for workstations, those will be available in Q3.
The first-gen Alchemist GPUs will have support for hardware-based ray-tracing, mesh shading, variable rate shading and DirectX 12 Ultimate. Gamers can expect to harness Intel’s AI-driven super sampling tech too.
Intel says its Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group (AXG) expects to ship more than 4 million discrete GPUs this year. Elsewhere, the company has started architecture work on the third generation of Arc GPUs, which are codenamed Celestial. Those will be geared toward the “ultra-enthusiast segment.” The second-gen GPUs, codenamed Battlemage, are also in development.
Meanwhile, at an investor meeting, Intel revealed plans for a service that will enable access to Arc GPUs via the cloud. It says Project Endgame, which will be available later this year, is “an always-accessible, low-latency computing experience,” but it hasn’t shared additional details as yet.
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