Intel ARC Alchemist Desktop Graphics Cards To Compete With AMD RX 6700 XT & NVIDIA RTX 3070, Pricing Starts at $100 US & Up To $500 US

Intel ARC Alchemist graphics card performance and price positioning slide has leaked out showing the NVIDIA and AMD GPUs the lineup will be competing against.

The leaked slide appeared on Baidu Forums (via Videocardz) and has been shared with retail partners by Intel. The slide lists down the proposed ARC Alchemist 'DG2' lineup for 2022 and respectively competitors they will be positioned against. According to the slide, the lineup will include at least four SKUs but there may be more. Also, the slide looks to be a little old since it doesn't mention the ARC branding that Intel just recently introduced for its graphics lineup so internal plans might have changed since then.

Intel's High-End ARC Gaming Graphics Card Lineup ($300 - $500 US)

With that said, let's talk about the upper echelon of the lineup which will feature Enthusiast ($400 - $499 US) and Performance+ ($300 - $399 US) graphics cards. These Intel ARC Alchemist GPUs will feature the 'SOC1' which could be the internal codename for the Alchemist 512 EU chip. This chip has a TDP range of 175W to 225W. The Enthusiast part will tackle the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 & the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT.

Do note that Intel doesn't plan to launch an 'Enthusiast+' contender in its first-gen ARC lineup as that will be reserved for the next-gen. This means that the top graphics cards from NVIDIA & AMD such as the GeForce RTX 3080 and the Radeon RX 6800 XT will remain uncontested.

Intel's Entry-Level ARC Gaming Graphics Card Lineup ($100 - $200 US)

Moving on to the lower-end segment, this is one place where Intel may hit AMD and NVIDIA hard considering both GPU manufacturers haven't released a single sub-$300 US desktop graphics card in the market yet. The mainstream segment will feature the 'SOC2' which is the Alchemist 128 EU GPU and will feature a TDP of 75W and up. ARC graphics cards based on this chip will be featured in the 'Mainstream+' ($150 - $199 US) and 'Mainstream' ($100 - $149 US) segment.

Both AMD and NVIDIA do have the chips to launch in the entry-level segment but they are being pushed to notebooks and laptops first. If launched prior to Q1 2022, then entry-level ARC GPUs will tackle AMD's Navi 24 (RX 6500 Series) and NVIDIA's GA107 GPUs (RTX 3050 Series) though those may end up over $200 US pricing considering where the mainstream cards are currently featured.

A major lead that Intel could have over the competition, especially NVIDIA since AMD lacks in this department, is AI assistance in supersampling technologies. Intel has already showcased an impressive demo of its XeSS technology and based on the expected numbers, Intel GPUs could outperform NVIDIA's Tensor Core implementation (DLSS) with its XMX architecture. Intel is also expected to feature a small but useful game cache on its GPUs and will be equipped with higher VRAM capacities of up to 16 GB (GDDR6) across a 256-bit bus interface. This would be twice as much memory as NVIDIA's RTX 3070 and RTX 3070 Ti so they may have to prepare a refresh to counter it.

We have seen the Intel Xe-HPG Alchemist GPU-based discrete graphics card engineering sample leak out a few months back along with some rumored performance and pricing figures, you can read more on that here. Based on the timeline, the Xe-HPG Alchemist lineup will compete against NVIDIA's Ampere & AMD RDNA 2 GPUs since both companies aren't expected to launch their next-gen parts by the very end of 2022. The Xe-HPG ARC GPUs will be coming to the mobility platform too and will be featured in Alder Lake-P notebooks.