Intel’s first Arc GPUs are launching today for laptops

After months of previews and teases, Intel is launching its first Arc A-series GPUs for laptops today. Only around twice the power of Intel's integrated Xe graphics, they bring support for DirectX 12 and dedicated ray-tracing hardware.

The A350M, Intel's least powerful Arc 3 series graphics card, is the only one that will be launched today. They are meant for ultraportable devices that want more graphical firepower than integrated graphics alone, not dedicated gaming machines. The Arc 5 and Arc 7 are set to arrive later this year and will offer significantly more graphics cores, ray-tracing units, memory, and power.

The company says that the XeSS system will be available in a similar window in the summer. Death Stranding: Directors Cut, for example, was launched without the feature in tow, despite being one of Intel's key demos for XeSS.

The company previously promised that the desktop versions of Arc would arrive in Q2 2022. There is a service that will let customers access Arc GPUs for an always-accessible, low-latency computing experience.

Today's Arc announcement feels a little more like a trial run than the grand debut of Intel's next big platform.

How good are Intel's new graphics processing units?

The answer, at least for now, is better than Intel's integrated Xe graphics, which was the primary comparison that the company gave as part of its announcement. Unfortunately, Intel glaringly didn't provide benchmarks on how any of its Arc GPUs, present or future, might compare to competing products.

Roger Chandler, Intel VP and GM of client graphics products and solutions, tells The Verge that they are focused on delivering a good experience.

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Intel focused on the performance of the Arc GPUs compared to the performance of the integrated graphics found in its Core i7-1280P chip. It's good to see that the Arc 3 hardware outdoes the integrated Iris graphics in both gaming and creative tasks, sometimes by nearly twice as much. The Arc GPUs draw as much power as Intel's CPUs do.

It is important to remember that this is the least powerful version of Intel's dedicated hardware. We will have to wait and see how Intel's chips compare to the existing graphics cards from the other two companies, as well as how well performance scales up to the more powerful laptop models.

At least this year, Intel's best graphics cards won't be aiming to be the absolute best graphics you can get on a laptop.

Some innovative features beyond sheer power may help the Arc GPUs stand out from their competitors. One example shown was how a smooth game streaming using XSplit would be possible with full AV1 hardware acceleration support from Intel.

Deep Link technology from Intel will be one of the key parts of the Arc graphics cards, as it will use the complete hardware stack of Intel processors and graphics cards to maximize power-sharing. Deep Link will allow the computer to do things like use both the integrated and discrete GPUs at the same time. The 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti laptops have a similar feature, too.

The Arc Control app will allow customers to handle game driver updates, tweaking and monitor performance, and more. You will be able to keep an eye on your graphics performance while playing and won't have to use an account to do so.

The first laptop to offer Arc 3 GPUs as an option is the Samsung Book2 Pro. The Arc laptops are set to start as low as $899 and the company promises a lot more designs in the coming weeks and months.