Friends who often pay attention to graphics cards should note that the graphics card market has not been very calm recently.
Last year, high-performance graphics cards were hyped into luxury goods by the mining wave, causing DIY players to complain, and now the wave has receded, and the price of graphics cards has gradually returned to normal.
In this up-and-down situation, Intel broke in with the newly released Arc discrete graphics. After nearly 20 years of "red and green wars", can Intel become the "spoiler" of the graphics card market as players wish?
Still a familiar recipe, still a familiar taste
Strictly speaking, Intel's entry into the discrete graphics market is not a crossover.
Intel's research on graphics chips dates back to the 1970s, and during the millennium, a series of discrete graphics products were introduced.
However, after this, Intel's focus on graphics processing gradually transitioned to integrated graphics, and now when it comes to Intel graphics, the first thing that comes to mind is the core graphics card born on the Core processor in 2010.
At last year's Intel Architecture Day, Intel unveiled plans to return to the discrete graphics market and unveiled a new graphics brand called Arc.
Now, almost a year later, we can finally get a glimpse of the first Intel Arc graphics card.
Intel's release is the Arc A series of discrete graphics for notebook mobile, with three models, namely Arc 3 for mainstream games, Arc 5 for performance games, and Arc 7 for hardcore performance games.
Arc 3, 5, and 7 are named in the same way as Core processors, and users who are not familiar with the product can roughly judge the performance differences of different series through simple numerical differences.
Compared to the naming of the A/N next door, Arc is obviously more user-friendly to small white users.
The three series include the A350M, A370M, A550M, A730M, A770M and A770M in total, and the performance difference is reflected in the number of core computing unit Xe cores, clock frequency, and memory capacity.
Intel said laptops with Arc 3 series graphics will be brought to market soon, while the Arc 5 and Arc 7 series are a little later, and Intel plans to launch in the second quarter of this year.
In terms of process technology, arc A series graphics cards use TSMC N6 process, which can expect Arc's performance in power control.
Before that, Intel answered the question that most people are more concerned about: How exactly is Arc graphics performance?
The perfect companion for Evo computers
Before looking at the performance comparison, it is worth noting that Intel has only announced the performance of the entry-level Arc 3 game at this time.
So, if you're looking forward to seeing Intel release a top-of-the-line graphics card that can compete with Intel and AMD, you can suppress your curiosity for the time being and wait for the Arc 7 to debut this summer.
Judging from the game tests released by Intel, the Arc 3's A370M can smoothly play mainstream games such as Destiny 2 and The Witcher 3 at a frame rate of 60FPS at 1080P resolution and medium image quality.
When playing mainstream online games such as Fortnite and Rocket League, the frame rate can be maintained above 90FPS, which can meet the game needs of most light players.
Compared with Intel's new generation of Iris X-core display, the A370M basically meets the standard of smooth operation of mainstream games.
As for the recent AAA blockbusters such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Eldon's Circle of Law, it is still too reluctant for the entry-level Arc 3, which is the "porcelain work" that arc 5 and above high-performance graphics cards can take.
In terms of content creation, the A370M has a good performance in Handbrake, Da Vinci, Premiere Pro and other software, such as in some transcoding and rendering work, the A370M has about 2 times the performance improvement compared to the Sharp Torch X core display.
At this time, you may have to ask: Does it make sense to compare the performance of a discrete graphics card with a core graphics card?
Arc is still of great significance to ultra-thin and light books that pursue portability. Intel released version 3.0 of the Evo specification earlier this year, which includes the introduction of support for Arc-only displays.
This means that in the future, the ultra-thin book that adopts the Evo specification can have characteristics such as long battery life, but also have certain game and video processing capabilities, and the ultra-thin book that was previously considered to be office-only can meet people's more diverse needs in the future.
In some display features, Intel's Arc also keeps up with Nvidia and AMD, such as ray tracing, ultra-resolution (Intel XeSS), anti-tear (Intel Speed Sync) and other "funky" functions Intel also gives Arc a should be arranged, and Arc is equipped with all series.
Among them, Intel's XeSS technology is similar to NVIDIA's DLSS and AMD FSR, which can use AI algorithms to raise low-resolution images to high-resolution levels.
To put it simply, in some scenes with little dynamic change, the original 1080P screen can get an approximate 4K look and feel through XeSS processing, compared with the native rendering of 4K screen, the load of the graphics card is much lower.
Another major advantage of Arc graphics cards is that in terms of video codec, Arc graphics cards support the popular AV1 standard in addition to supporting mainstream standards such as VP9, AVC, H.264, H.265, etc.
AV1 encoding is a new generation of open source video codec standards launched by a development media alliance composed of Amazon, Apple, Arm, Cisco, Meta, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, NVIDIA, Samsung, Tencent and other giants.
Intel emphasizes that Arc is the first graphics card with av1 hardware codec built in, which can provide AV1 hardware acceleration for software such as Da Vinci, Premiere Pro, FFMPEG, etc., which helps to promote the further popularization of the AV1 standard.
Double U collocation, work is not tired
Another important feature of Arc graphics is that it can be linked to its own 12th generation Core processor and its core display to achieve stronger performance through collaborative work, which Intel calls Deep Link technology.
Deep Link technology includes three functions: "dynamic power sharing", "super coding" and "super computing power".
In the past, the CPU and gpu were like two separate parts, and everyone did their own work and had nothing to do with each other.
"Dynamic power sharing" is simply to bundle the CPU and GPU together, when processing high-load images, more power can be allocated to the GPU, and when the GPU is idle, it can be allocated to the CPU, reducing the power consumption of the whole machine.
For notebook platforms that focus on power control, "dynamic power sharing" can bring more flexible space for performance scheduling.
"Super encoding" is also well understood, because the CPU's core display and Arc master out of the same door, in the video encoding of the two can work together, sharing the pressure of unique display, improve the efficiency of coding.
"Super Computing Power" can intelligently assign a task to two graphics cards, and process it reasonably together through their respective computing engines to enhance the overall computing performance.
It's not hard to see that Intel, as a latecomer to the market, is trying to leverage its dual platforms across processors and graphics to compete with Nvidia and AMD.
At the end, Intel also predicted that desktop Arc graphics will be released this summer, and the Arc 3 that debuts now is like a starter, and the real feast is still to come.
At present, it is too early to make a conclusion about the success or failure of Arc, after all, in addition to performance, what can really determine the success or failure of a graphics card is its price.