Intel Arc is a brand of

graphics processing units A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal co ...

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

. These are discrete GPUs mostly marketed for the high-margin

gaming PC A gaming computer, also known as a gaming PC, is a specialized personal computer designed for playing PC games at high standards. They typically differ from mainstream personal computers by using high-performance graphics cards, a high core-co ...

market. The brand also covers Intel's consumer graphics software and services. Arc competes with

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

GeForce GeForce is a brand of graphics processing units (GPUs) designed by Nvidia and marketed for the performance market. As of the GeForce 50 series, there have been nineteen iterations of the design. In August 2017, Nvidia stated that "there are o ...

and

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

Radeon Radeon () is a brand of computer products, including graphics processing units, random-access memory, RAM disk software, and solid-state drives, produced by Radeon Technologies Group, a division of AMD. The brand was launched in 2000 by ATI Tech ...

lines. The Arc-A series for laptops was launched on March 30, 2022, with the A750 and A770 both released in Q3 2022. Intel missed their initial Q2 2022 release target, with most discrete Arc GPUs not launching until October 2022. Intel officially launched the Arc Pro workstation GPUs on August 8, 2022. Intel officially announced the 2nd-generation Battlemage GPUs on December 3rd, 2024. The first model, the B580, was released on December 13th, 2024.

Etymology

According to Intel, the brand is named after the concept of

story arc A story arc (also narrative arc) is the chronological construction of a plot in a novel or story. It can also mean an extended or continuing narrative, storyline in episode, episodic storytelling media such as television, comic books, comic strip ...

s found in video games. Each generation of Arc is named after

character class In tabletop games and video games, a character class is an occupation, profession, or role assigned to a game character to highlight and differentiate their capabilities and specializations. In role-playing games (RPGs), character classes ag ...

es sorted by each letter of the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

in ascending order. They begin with A, then B, then C, and so on. The first generation is named Alchemist, while Battlemage, Celestial and Druid are the respective names for the second, third and fourth Arc generations.

Graphics processor generations

Alchemist

Developed under the previous codename "DG2", the first generation of Intel Arc GPUs (codenamed "Alchemist") released on March 30, 2022. It comes in both add-on desktop card and laptop form factors.

TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC or Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is one of the world's most valuable semiconductor companies, the world' ...

manufactures the die, using their N6 process. Alchemist uses the

Intel Xe Intel Xe (stylized as Xe and pronounced as two separate letters, abbreviation for "exascale for everyone"), earlier known unofficially as Gen12, is a GPU architecture developed by Intel. Intel Xe includes a new instruction set architecture. T ...

GPU architecture, or more specifically, the Xe-HPG variant. Alchemist supports hardware-based ray tracing, XeSS or

supersampling Supersampling or supersampling anti-aliasing (SSAA) is a spatial anti-aliasing method, i.e. a method used to remove aliasing (jagged and pixelated edges, colloquially known as "jaggies") from images rendered in computer games or other computer p ...

based on neural networks (similar to Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR), and

DirectX 12 Ultimate Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct" ...

. Also supported are DisplayPort 2.0 and

overclocking In computing, overclocking is the practice of increasing the clock rate of a computer to exceed that certified by the manufacturer. Commonly, operating voltage is also increased to maintain a component's operational stability at accelerated sp ...

AV1 AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 tha ...

fixed-function hardware encoder is included in Alchemist GPUs as part of the

Intel Quick Sync Video Intel Quick Sync Video is Intel's brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware core. Quick Sync was introduced with the Sandy Bridge CPU microarchitecture on 9 January 2011 and has been found on the die of Intel CPUs ever since. ...

core. Intel confirmed ASTC support has been removed from hardware starting with Alchemist and future Arc GPU microarchitectures will also not support it. Arc Alchemist does not support SR-IOV or

Direct3D Direct3D is a graphics application programming interface (API) for Microsoft Windows. Part of DirectX, Direct3D is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses hardware ...

9 natively, instead falling back on the D3D9On12 wrapper which translates Direct3D 9 calls to their Direct3D 12 equivalents. Arc support OpenCL 3.0 for example, this GPU can work in the

grid Grid, The Grid, or GRID may refer to: Space partitioning * Regular grid, a tessellation of space with translational symmetry, typically formed from parallelograms or higher-dimensional analogs ** Grid graph, a graph structure with nodes connec ...

World Community Grid World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest volunteer computing platform to perform scientific research that benefits humanity. Launched on November 16, 2004, with proprietary Grid MP client from United Devices and add ...

. Display connections: DisplayPort 2.0 (40 Gbit/s bandwidth) and

HDMI 2.1 High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a proprietary digital interface used to transmit high-quality video and audio signals between devices. It is commonly used to connect devices such as televisions, computer monitors, projectors, g ...

Desktop

Mobile

Workstation

Battlemage

Battlemage (X^e2) is the second-generation X^e architecture that debuted with its low power variant in

Lunar Lake Lunar Lake is the codename for Core Ultra 200V Series mobile processors designed by Intel, released in September 2024. It is a successor to Meteor Lake which saw Intel move from monolithic silicon to a disaggregated MCM design. Background O ...

mobile processors that released in September 2024. On December 3, 2024, Intel announced two Arc B-Series desktop graphics cards based on the X^e2-HPG graphics architecture.

Desktop

Workstation

Future generations

Intel also revealed future generations of Intel Arc GPUs under development: Celestial (X^e3), and Druid (X^e4). Intel revealed that

Meteor Lake Meteor Lake is the codename for Core Ultra Series 1 mobile processors, designed by Intel and officially released on December 14, 2023. It is the first generation of Intel mobile processors to use a chiplet architecture which means that the proce ...

and later generations of CPU SoCs uses an Intel Arc Tile GPU.

Intel XeSS

Intel XeSS is a

real-time Real-time, realtime, or real time may refer to: Computing * Real-time computing, hardware and software systems subject to a specified time constraint * Real-time clock, a computer clock that keeps track of the current time * Real-time Control Syst ...

deep learning Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that focuses on utilizing multilayered neural networks to perform tasks such as classification, regression, and representation learning. The field takes inspiration from biological neuroscience a ...

image

upsampling In digital signal processing, upsampling, expansion, and interpolation are terms associated with the process of sample rate conversion, resampling in a multi-rate digital signal processing system. ''Upsampling'' can be synonymous with ''expansion'' ...

technology developed primarily for use in video games as a competitor to Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR technologies. Additionally, XeSS is not restricted to Arc graphics cards. It utilizes XMX instructions exclusive to Arc graphics cards, but will fall back to utilizing DP4a instructions on competing GPUs that have support for DP4a instructions. XeSS is trained with 64 samples per pixel as opposed to Nvidia DLSS's 16 samples per pixel (

16K 16K resolution is a display resolution with approximately 16,000 pixels horizontally. The most commonly discussed 16K resolution as of 2025, is , which doubles the pixel count of 8K resolution, 8K UHD in each dimension, for a total of four tim ...

reference images).

Issues

Drivers

Performance on Intel Arc GPUs has suffered from poor driver support, particularly at launch. An investigation by Gamers Nexus discovered 43 known driver issues with Arc GPUs, prompting a response and acknowledgement of the issues from Intel. Intel CEO

Pat Gelsinger Patrick Paul Gelsinger (; born March 5, 1961) is an American business executive and engineer, who was the CEO of Intel from February 2021 to December 2024. Based mainly in Silicon Valley since the late 1970s, Gelsinger graduated from Stanford ...

also blamed driver problems as a reason for Arc's delayed launch. A beta driver from October 2022 accidentally reduced the memory clock by 9% on the Arc A770 from 2187MHz to 2000MHz, resulting in a 17% reduction in memory bandwidth. This particular issue was later fixed. Intel provides an open source driver for Linux.

DirectX 9 compatibility

As of the Alchemist generation, Arc only includes direct hardware support for the

DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct" ...

11 & 12 and

Vulkan Vulkan is a cross-platform API and open standard for 3D graphics and computing. It was intended to address the shortcomings of OpenGL, and allow developers more control over the GPU. It is designed to support a wide variety of GPUs, CPUs and o ...

graphics APIs, with the older DirectX 9 & 10 and

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a Language-independent specification, cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D computer graphics, 2D and 3D computer graphics, 3D vector graphics. The API is typic ...

APIs being supported via a real-time

compatibility layer In software engineering, a compatibility layer is an interface that allows binaries for a legacy or foreign system to run on a host system. This translates system calls for the foreign system into native system calls for the host system. With s ...

built into Intel's graphics driver. As a result, Alchemist GPUs perform noticeably worse than competing

and

GPUs in software that can only use these older APIs, including multiple DirectX 9-based

esports Esports (), short for electronic sports, is a form of competition using video games. Esports often takes the form of organized, multiplayer video game competitions, particularly between professional players, played individually or as teams. ...

games such as '' Counter-Strike: Global Offensive'', ''

League of Legends ''League of Legends'' (''LoL'', commonly referred to as ''League'', is a multiplayer online battle arena video game developed and published by Riot Games. Inspired by ''Defense of the Ancients'', a Mod (video games), custom map for ''Warcraf ...

'' and '' StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty''. There is also a performance gap between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12. A December 2022 driver update improved Arc compatibility and performance with DirectX 9-based games. According to Intel, the driver update made Arc GPUs up to 1.8x faster in DirectX 9 games. A February 2023 driver update further improved Arc's performance on DirectX 9-based games.

Legacy BIOS compatibility

Intel Arc requires a

UEFI Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI, as an acronym) is a Specification (technical standard), specification for the firmware Software architecture, architecture of a computing platform. When a computer booting, is powered on, the UEFI ...

BIOS with resizable BAR support for optimal performance. UEFI Class 1 and Class 2 BIOS are not supported by Intel Arc.

Footnotes

References

External links

Official website

{{Intel Computer-related introductions in 2022 Graphics processing units Graphics cards Intel graphics