Intel Releases Gameplay Teaser for Its Upcoming Arc GPUs

Intel seemingly took advantage of the fact that neither AMD or Nvidia appeared at this year’s gala, according to Videocardz, allowing it to show its demo without worrying about being upstaged by an RTX 3090 Ti announcement or something along those lines. The demo begins with the clever line, “A new player has entered the game,” and shows both an Intel Arc-branded laptop and desktop, though these are just renders and it’s doubtful Intel will actually sell tower PCs or laptops with this branding. The game demo shows a variety of games running at an unknown resolution and frame rate, including: Riders Republic, Age of Empires IV, Back 4 Blood, The Riftbreaker, Hitman, and Arcadegeddon.

In our opinion, the gameplay in the demo certainly looked fluid and smooth, but whenever a vendor leaves the frame counter off a video it makes us even more curious. That said, the highest quality version available in the YouTube video is 1440p, so if it’s a card that can run that resolution at 60fps at max quality with ray tracing enabled, it could be a contender. Also of interest is when it shows the rendered system at the end with the RGB PSU cables, we can see it’s a single 8-pin cable, so it would seem like Intel is targeting the upper mid-range of the market instead of flagship cards like the RTX 3080/3090, and Radeon RX 6900 XT cards.

What’s really curious about the video though is at the very end of, at the bottom of the screen, is this inscrutable disclaimer: “Results that are based on systems and components as well as results that have been estimated or simulated using an Intel Reference Platform (an internal example new system), Internal Intel analysis or architecture simulation or modeling are shown for informational purposes only.” Oh, so we’re looking at an estimated simulation, based on internal analysis, for informational purposes? Awesome.

Regardless, the company did highlight some of the advanced features its Arc GPUs will offer, including “AI-enhanced Upscaling” and “ray tracing” as part of the core technology. We would have also liked to see, “available for purchase” as a standout feature, but alas, it’s 2021 so we can’t ask for everything.

Snark aside, the hype train is beginning to leave the station for whatever Intel has up its sleeve. The anticipation isn’t completely due to Intel’s pedigree in this market, as the company has previously only made low-powered iGPUs embedded in its CPUs, but due to the fact that Intel is saying its GPU will deliver “high performance.” Plus, if there’s one thing gamers need right now, it’s more GPUs, and more competition, so I think we speak for all gamers when we say to Intel, “Welcome to party pal.”

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