Monday, August 16th 2021
Intel Shows Off AAA Gaming Capabilities of Intel Arc "Alchemist" GPU
It's been a crazy day for PC graphics, with Intel announcing its big entry into the gaming graphics space with the new Intel Arc brand of graphics processors, arriving in Q1-2022. The first of these, codenamed "Alchemist," has been known as the "DG2" for some time now. Intel revealed that not only is this a high-performance product, but also meets DirectX 12 Ultimate requirements, including real-time raytracing. The company is also working on an AI-accelerated supersampling feature rivaling NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR. Later in the day, Intel Graphics put out a delectable video of AAA gameplay as rendered on an Intel Arc graphics processor, and it looks nice! We're shown titles like "Metro Exodus," "Rift Breaker," "Crysis Remastered," and "Forza Horizon 4," rendered at 1440p, with eye-candy rivaling any contemporary performance-segment GPU from NVIDIA or AMD.
The video presentation by Intel Graphics follows.
61 Comments on Intel Shows Off AAA Gaming Capabilities of Intel Arc "Alchemist" GPU
In saying that, Radeon IGPs have basically been abandoned for the last four years. AMD has other priorities and the IGPs in consumer CPUs are afterthoughts at best right now.
Just check out Intel Iris Pro 5200. It came with i7 4770R, i5 4670R, i5 4570R and some others chips. As far as I know they were put into Gigabyte Brix mini computers. Here is one of the weakest variation of it running Skyrim at 1080p medium-high settings:
That looks very solid to me. Then Intel launched Iris Pro 6200 on mainstream Broadwell chips. Here is one in action, it runs Titanfall at 1080p, low-high
Unfortunately there is no fps counter, but to me it looks like it reaches 30-50 fps. Not great, but totally serviceable and decently enjoyable. Intel also made Iris Pro P6300, but those were super rare and only came with Xeons, so they had no significance for consumers. Then after Gen 8, Intel launched Gen 9. With 2016's flagships being Iris Pro 580. Here is one in action running bunch of popular games:
Not bad, next year Intel updated their IGP line up and flagship was Iris Plus 650, for desktop famous UHD 630, and the last flagship was Iris Plus 655. All were not as fast as Iris Pro 580, but UHD 630 came with almost every desktop Intel coffee lake and kaby lake chips, so it was very popular and it wasn't gutless either. UHD 630 was midspec Gen 9 chip, it came with 24 GT2 EUs, meanwhile Iris Pro 580 came with 72 GT4 EUs. So here is one in action:
Despite massive cut down of GPU resources, UHD 630 was still somewhat passable iGPU. Raja Koduri only came to Intel before Coffee Lake's launch, so he didn't do much to all these iGPUs. Afterwards, Intel started to put more EUs. Intel Xe got 96 EUs, which were also clocked higher. Meanwhile desktops only got cut down UHD 750 with only 32 EUs. That's still more than in previous gen, but desktop got gimped bad again. It makes sense, on desktop IGP is just display adapter, meanwhile on laptop IGP may be all what fits as gaming or professional GPU, also laptops CPU dies may be smaller, so it's only natural that laptops are getting Xe graphics and desktops get gimped UHD 750. Anyway, here's Xe in action:
Pretty good for IGP, there was not a single unplayable game. But here's one thing. Xe when it was launched plays AAA games at 720p low at 40 fps, meanwhile some Iris GPUs when they were launched achieved same performance, but at 1080p and low-high settings. relatively Iris IGPs were a lot better. Now they are obviously weak and incapable of anything interesting, but after launch they were more impressive than Xe is now. So it seems that either new games got terribly more demanding or Xe isn't a good launch as Iris Pro was.
Except the 5700G wipes the floor with Intel offerings at the same price point in every metric measured.
Even on older Vega GPU tech.
Remind me to be excited when they have a product, it’s competitive, it’s pricing is competitive, it doesn’t have the bugs, and it’s actually available. Until then it’s all smoke and mirrors.
As for the Iris graphics, those weren't mainstream, limited to Apple, niche embedded parts in NUCs and the like, and generally unavailable to consumers as processors in the retail channel. Having owned one I can say for certain that during the active product lifespan the drivers were atrocious with too many games unplayable for months after launch due to driver issues that took Intel unacceptably long to rectify.
There's no denying that Intel graphics have made vast strides over the years, but looking back at what I couldn't play on my HD2000, HD3000, HD4000, HD4600, Iris 6100, HD620, HD630, and Xe (80EU 1135G7) Intel are still playing catchup, both in raw performance and also drivers that just work. HD630 is probably the first time I could assume a game was supported correctly by the driver and Xe is genuinely impressive (despite getting schooled by my 4700U).
It seems that Intel isn't all that much behind Vega. Considering that Intel UHD 750 has twice less cores than Vega 8, it may mean that each core is faster than each Vega core. I think it might be a question of company politics rather than technological prowess at this point. If Intel put more GPU cores with CPUs they likely could match or beat Vega 8 already. Not only that, but maybe even take on Vega 11. But I don't know how much space those graphics take up and it's clear that Intel is very conservative with IGPs on desktop parts. Or maybe they noticed that Vegas are bandwidth starved and just made iGPUs just so good that they aren't as bandwidth starved. That may give them some power efficiency and save die space.