Despite the ongoing chip shortage, Intel’s Arc Alchemist graphics cards are ready to emerge. An official release date has finally been announced. The first wave of Arc GPUs to be released will be for laptops and will be unveiled at an official Intel Arc event on March 20.
There are several different versions of the notebook GPU, but as confirmed by Lisa Pearce, Intel’s Vice President of Visual Computing Group, via a post on the Intel community blog, the Arc A370M will be the first model to be released.
This first GPU to be offered is definitely not very powerful. However, considering the average frame rates at 1080p medium settings in Intel’s Metro Exodus, it claims twice the performance of the integrated GPUs. It looks like the Arc A370M will come in handy not only for PC gamers who love old games or low-end games, but also for creators who want a little more power from their laptops in apps like Blender or Maya.
Pearce writes on the blog: “We’ve worked hard to prepare our Intel Arc graphics products for gamers and creators. It’s been an incredible journey and we’re excited to launch our mobile family of Intel Arc A-series GPUs on March 30, and Intel Deep We’re excited to start showcasing key technologies like Link, XeSS and more.”
We originally expected the Arc Alchemist desktop GPU to also launch in Q1. But in February, Intel announced it wouldn’t be available until the second quarter. These GPUs are expected to hit the market between May 2 and June 1.