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Engineering Arc – 3/14/2022

Lisa_Pearce
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by Lisa Pearce, Vice President and General Manager for the Visual Compute Group

As we bring Intel® Arc™ graphics to market, we want to engage directly with the tech community, gamers and creators. As part of that, we want to use this space regularly to update you on upcoming hardware and software releases. For this first posting, I’ve picked the top 3 questions we’ve been asked since our CES press conference in January.

Question #1: Why are you releasing the mobile version of Intel Arc graphics ahead of desktop?

We have been hard at work preparing our Intel Arc graphics products for gamers and creators. It has been an incredible journey, and we are excited to begin launching our mobile family of Intel Arc A-series GPUs on March 30th and showcasing key technologies, like Intel® Deep Link, XeSS and more.

Intel technology powers a significant share of the world’s notebooks, and we have decades of experience building leadership platforms with our partners. By beginning to launch our mobile products first, we aim to bring all our technologies (CPU, graphics, media, display, I/O, etc.) to bear to deliver great experiences.

Question #2: What performance can we expect from the first product to make it to market, the Intel Arc A370M?

The first Intel Arc discrete graphics products to enter the mobile market will enable up to a 2X improvement in graphics performance vs. integrated graphics alone while maintaining similar form factors.1 This is the first time you’ll find verified Intel® Evo™ designs with discrete graphics able to maintain the experience standards of that program thanks to Intel Deep Link technology, like Power Share. After that, you’ll see higher performance configs of Intel Arc graphics for both notebook and desktop designs that raise performance levels for gamers and creators. More details and exact specs will be shared soon.

In general, software tuning is critical to deliver maximum performance on GPUs, but it will take some time for us to mature our GPU stack for all applications. So, to accelerate performance today, we have developed application optimization techniques (such as shader tuning) that ensure top applications deliver a great experience, while our compiler matures in parallel. These optimizations are now in place for the top 50 applications, and we are rapidly expanding our coverage to the top 100.

Application compatibility is also critical for our users, and while we expect nearly all applications to run, we’ve tested the top 100 applications for compatibility and performance, and we are expanding or efforts to cover the top 200 applications. For games, we will be publishing simple summaries to help end users understand the capabilities of each specific product. For example, we will publish the number of games playable at 1080p or 1440p resolution across medium or high-quality settings. An example of what we will publish at launch is something like the below table:

Experience Band (Average FPS)

Title count
>90 #
>60 #
>45 #
<45 #

Example Entry Notebook Data: 1080p Medium

As we build up this data set, we are also committed to continuously evolve the game experience on Intel Arc graphics products and publish metrics on frame rate variability, stability and smoothness. You’ll hear more on this front later this year, and we’ll be eager to hear your feedback.

Question #3: What is this Project Endgame I heard about?

Intel is determined to lower the barriers that can sometimes make PC gaming difficult today. Game compatibility issues, long download times, high performance variability and frequent patches and updates are just a few. Solving these requires investments and innovations in software technologies like cloud computing and global services.

Project Endgame is a unified services layer that harnesses computing resources everywhere – cloud, edge, and your home, to improve your gaming, and non-gaming, PC experiences. With Project Endgame, we can untether our users from their local hardware specs. Project Endgame is paving the roads for the next decade of real-time GPU experiences for Intel, with the goal of petaflops of compute accessible at a few millisecond latency, and starting in Q2 of this year we will take our first public steps.

We are eager for everyone to experience Intel Arc graphics and to engage with the community on features or improvements you’d like to see next. Stay tuned for more updates throughout the year. And be sure to join us on March 30th for the Intel Arc graphics mobile product announcement, and feel free to join the conversation on the Insider Community Discord!

Welcome to Intel Arc! Let’s Play!

 

Performance Disclosure:

1. 2x performance claim based on average FPS at 1080p Medium with Metro Exodus (DX12) as of March 3, 2022 as the beginning of the disclosure. Intel Arc system: Intel Core i7-12700H processor 14C/20T, 32GB 4800Mhz system memory, Intel Arc A370M graphics, Windows 11 Pro v10.0.22000, Preproduction driver as of March 2022, total system TDP 56W Intel Core system: Intel Core i71280P 14C/20T, 32GB 4800 MHz system memory, Iris Xe integrated graphics, Windows 11 Pro 21H2 22000.493, Driver version 30.0.101.1029, total system TDP 28W.

Notices and Disclaimers:

Performance varies by use, configuration and other factors. Learn more at www.Intel.com/PerformanceIndex

Performance results are based on testing as of dates shown in configurations and may not reflect all publicly available updates. See configuration disclosure for details.

 

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About the Author
Lisa (@gfxlisa) is a 25 year Intel veteran who has led our GPU software stack development and is now the Vice President of Intel's Visual Computing Group.