Intel Arc is the new brand for their high-performance GPUs, Alchemist arrives in 2022

Intel announced today that Arc is the new, proper brand name for their upcoming high-performance discreet graphics hardware, based upon the Xe architecture with the first named Alchemist arriving in 2022.

With Intel Xe being a scalable architecture, it will power multiple generations of devices so Intel are clearly preparing a roadmap for the long-game to compete alongside AMD and NVIDIA. Intel mentioned that it's based specifically only Xe-HPG which is a "convergence of Intel's Xe LP, HP and HPC microarchitectures".

"Today marks a key moment in the graphics journey we started just a few years ago. The launch of the Intel Arc brand and the reveal of future hardware generations signifies Intel’s deep and continued commitment to gamers and creators everywhere. We have teams doing incredible work to ensure we deliver first-class and frictionless experiences when these products are available early next year." — Roger Chandler, Intel vice president and general manager of Client Graphics Products and Solutions

Not much else has been revealed about Intel Arc today other than codenames for future generations including "Battlemage", "Celestial" and "Druid". We're expecting to learn a lot more later this year. For now they've mentioned supporting hardware-based ray tracing, artificial intelligence-driven super sampling and full support for DirectX 12 Ultimate (once again like other vendors Vulkan doesn't get mentioned much or at all - but Vulkan will be fully supported).

So we have AMD FSR, NVIDIA DLSS and now Intel are going to have something as well. Considering Intel are pretty pro open-source, it will be fun to see what they're cooking up.

No exact date yet for Intel Arc Alchemist, other than Q1 2022. Intel say it will be available for desktops and notebooks. You can learn more and see a video of it in action on their official website or on their Twitter post.