While giants such as NVIDIA and AMD were competing with each other, Intel, one of the world’s largest chip manufacturers, also decided to participate in this competition. While the company’s high-end screens are still waiting for the market, a new series that will be among these graphics cards has been announced today.

Intel has announced the Intel Arc Pro graphics card series, which it targets especially professionals. The new series, consisting of Intel Arc Pro A40, A50 and laptop graphics card A30M, aims to provide maximum optimization especially in Blender, HandBrake, Premiere Pro and many more professional applications. Let’s look at the details of the cards.

The most prominent feature of graphics cards: AV1 encode support!

• Left: H.264, Right: AV1

Intel has not yet shared all the features and performance results of the new graphics cards. However, according to the details shared about the graphics cards, we can say that the most important feature to be found, especially if we consider that it appeals to professionals, is the full-range AV1 hardware acceleration.

According to Intel, thanks to this feature, which is a first in the industry, users will be able to move away from today’s standard H.264 and switch to AV1, which is described as the ‘future’. Thanks to the AV1, it is possible to produce higher resolution videos. Being able to decode the AV1 takes only processing power up to 1080p resolution. Higher resolutions require high-end graphics cards such as the RTX 30 or Radeon RX 6000 series. This analysis is done with software only.

With Intel’s new graphics cards, it directly incorporates a hardware component into the resolution process. In this way, AV1 decoding and encoding turns into operations that are much more energy efficient and can be done much faster.

How about the graphics performance?

When we come to the other important shared features of the graphics cards, of course, we encounter the graphics performance. While the highest performance is 3.50 teraflops in the entry-level graphics card of the series, this value rises to 4.80 in the A50 model. Of course, the difference also makes itself felt in power consumption. While the A40 consumes a maximum of 50 W, this number rises to 75 W in the A50, which occupies two slots. The mobile processor, on the other hand, offers 3.50 teraflops of performance at 35 – 50 W power consumption.

Support for 2 8K displays:

Intel’s new graphics cards also stand out in terms of display support. The graphics cards allow simultaneous connection of 2 x 60 Hz 8K resolution, 1 x 240 Hz 5K resolution, 2 x 120 Hz 5K resolution or 4 x 60 Hz 4K resolution display.

So who are the competitors of these graphics cards?

When we look at the features written on the paper, we see that the new series is also below NVIDIA’s RTX 3050 model. Although the new series is not very impressive with its teraflop value, the main goal of the graphics cards will be to carry the AV1 hardware accelerator feature and to be a tool for manufacturers. Of course, this does not mean that games cannot be played with these graphics cards.

In summary, graphics cards aim not for pure graphics performance, but to ensure that artificial intelligence tools that will process more graphics work at the best level.

Intel Arc Pro A40 features:

• Peak performance: 3.50 teraflops
• Ray tracing core: 8
• Memory: 6GB GDDR6
• Display outputs: 4 mini DisplayPorts

Intel Arc Pro A50 features:

• Peak performance: 4.80 teraflops
• Ray tracing core: 8
• Memory: 6GB GDDR6
• Display outputs: 4 mini DisplayPorts

Intel Arc Pro A30M features:

• Peak performance: 3.50 teraflops
• Ray tracing core: 8
• Memory: 4GB GDDR6
• Display outputs: Up to 4 depending on laptop

When are the graphics cards coming out?

While the price of the new series has not been announced yet, it is stated that the graphics cards will be released this year.