The timely release of Intel's gaming graphics cards has been derailed by the company's departure from Russia

Preparations for the release of Intel's Arc Alchemist graphics gas pedals have long been out of schedule.
Arc A770 and A750 discrete graphics cards were supposed to be introduced at the end of last year, but their announcement has not yet happened.
As it turned out, the delay is largely due to the closure of the Intel's Russian office.LinusTechTipsThe details of the processes that take place in the Intel graphics direction was shared by a well-known IT journalist Charlie Demerdjian.
According to his information, Intel was initially going to release discrete graphics cards of Arc Alchemist family back in the end of last year.
However, due to the enforced idle time, the production partner was not able to produce video card samples by the scheduled time, so the Arc A-series cards announcement was postponed to the second half of the first quarter, but even this plan was not fated to come to life.
It was disrupted by the fact that in early spring Intel stopped the work of the company's Russian office, including the branch located in Nizhny Novgorod.
The point is that a significant part of the work on creating the necessary software was carried out there.
Russian specialists were responsible for one of the key graphics driver components, the shader compiler.
The Russian division was too tightly integrated into the Intel structure for its closure to go unnoticed for its business.
About 1,200 Intel employees worked in our country, and the local office was one of the largest in Europe.
A large team of highly skilled engineers worked in Russia, creating the oneAPI and OpenVINO tools, and, as it turns out now, contributed significantly to the writing of the graphics driver for the Intel Arc family video cards.The problems with the Arc Alchemist driver are still unresolved.
From testing younger Arc A380 graphics card, we know that Arc Alchemist family has performance issues in DirectX 9 and 11, works unstably in some games, and is prone to a lot of other software issues.
Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes.
Intel took extraordinary efforts and tried to keep the team of Russian developers, who worked on the Arc Alchemist driver.
However, according to Demerdjian, they failed to do so to the fullest extent.
They were offered relocation, but not all key employees agreed to move, and the developers who emigrated were scattered across Intel offices in different countries, making it difficult to continue working together on the driver.
All this forces Intel to postpone the release of Arc A770 and A750 again and again.
The company is faced with a choice: either release graphics cards with a \"raw\" driver and vague prospects of fixing flaws in the near future, or first solve the problem with frames and normalize the driver development, and only then attempt to enter the market of mass gaming gas pedals.
In any case, as Demerdjian writes, the Arc Alchemist family is already hopelessly outdated, and Intel's first full-fledged bid to compete with AMD and NVIDIA in the graphics market will be the next generation of GPUs - Arc Battlemage (DG3).

Intel claims its graphics cards do ray tracing better than the GeForce RTX

In a conversation with PCGamer, Intel graphics marketing director Ryan Shrout and his colleague Tom Petersen said that the Arc A770 and A750 graphics cards outperform the current generation of GeForce RTX graphics cards in terms of ray tracing performance.
LinusTechTipsNaturally, we're talking about comparisons with products of the same class here.
Earlier, Intel said that it considers its future graphics cards Arc A770 and A750 as a competitor to the GeForce RTX 3060, if we talk about the performance in games with DirectX 12.
Now Intel has decided to focus on the fact that its hardware ray tracing block is more efficient.
\"The ray tracing block we have implemented is very good in real-world tasks,\" Petersen said.
- When you compare the tracing speeds of the RTX 3060 and the A750 or A770, you should see very good results from us.
We are definitely competitive or even better than Nvidia with our ray tracing solution.
\"In other words, Intel representatives claim that the performance of the ray tracing blocks in the first generation Arc graphics cards was even better than the similar hardware solution from Nvidia in the second generation.
According to available data, this is due to a special implementation in the Arc Alchemist architecture BVH cache inside GPU.
Also according to Petersen, the advantage of Intel's approach to hardware ray tracing is that game developers require minimal effort to make it work.
Intel acknowledges that it does not play a leading role in the graphics market, so it cannot dictate the standards.
Therefore, the company has chosen a different approach - everything is done so that game developers have as easy as possible with the optimization: it should not require the involvement of high-level technical experts.Unfortunately, Intel representatives were not able to give a definite answer to the question when the graphics cards Arc A770 and A750 will appear on the market.
It is assumed that the announcement could take place on September 27, when Intel plans to hold the next Intel Innovation event.

Intel has denied rumors about its refusal to develop future generations of discrete graphics

Intel's return to the discrete graphics segment could not be easy by definition, so we should not be surprised by rumors about the company's willingness to curtail all related initiatives amid the emerging difficulties.
Representatives from the company, responsible for the development of graphics, insist that the profile activities do not stop and already covers products for two generations ahead.Image source: FutureThe staff of the resource PC Gamer was able to get comments from Tom Petersen (Tom Petersen), who after the transfer from NVIDIA to Intel is responsible for issues related to the development of graphics solutions.
According to him, Intel is \"not going anywhere\" in the discrete graphics segment, and the company's developments in this area form the basis not only for integrated graphics solutions, but also specific products for data centers.
Petersen acknowledges that Intel's activity in this area creates a lot of uncertainty and rumor, but he feels it is important to stress that Intel is not giving up on its plans for discrete graphics; in fact, most discrete graphics engineers at Intel are already involved in developing the next generation of Battlemage to replace the current Alchemist.
As far as driver development is concerned, the balance of forces is in the opposite principle: the main resources are concentrated on Alchemist, while the perspective Battlemage is paid less attention to.
Part of Intel engineers are even involved in defining \"common technology pillars\" for even more distant generation of discrete graphics, known as Celestial.
The only thing known about it so far is that it will be released after 2024.Intel's lack of competitive offers for the upper price range within the Alchemist family, according to Petersen, should not embarrass consumers.
The company has returned to the discrete segment of the market through a niche of mass-market solutions, but will offer more powerful graphics processors in the future.

The Intel driver has revealed the full list of upcoming ARC Alchemist graphics cards

advertisementThe graphics card market has for many years featured only two key players, NVIDIA and AMD, whose competition is driving progress in the graphics card market forward.
Intel also has its own graphics solutions in the form of integrated GPUs, but this category of products offers incomparably lower performance and can hardly be considered as gaming products.
Since the beginning of the use of graphics cards in mining their cost has increased steadily, and many users are hoping to enter the market a third major player, able to change the balance of power by making gaming cards more accessible.
Such solutions, according to some, should be a line of graphics cards from Intel company Alchemist.
Unfortunately, today intel not only did not announce a complete list of gas pedals Alchemist, but also postponed their release to the end of summer 2022, citing the presence of difficulties with the readiness of software products and supply of components due to the pandemic.At least, there is a reliable \"leak\" online, revealing a list of products Alchemist preparing for release.
The website Wccftech reported that the latest Intel driver with the number 30.0.101.1732 contains the names of all graphics processors Alchemist.The flagship product line will be Arc A770 on the chip Arc ACM-G10 with 32 blocks Xe (4096 cores).
Arc A750 and Arc A580 will be responsible for middle segment, having 24 (3072 ALUs) and 16 Xe cores (2048 ALUs) respectively.
The Arc A750 will feature 8GB of memory and a 256-bit bus.
However, since this solution will have to compete with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, the memory scheme may be revised to a 12GB and 192-bit bus variant.
From the Arc A580 we should hardly expect more than 8 GB (256-bit).In the budget segment Intel will offer the Arc A380, A350 and A310 models.
They are expected to have 6 GB and 4 GB of GDDR6 video memory with 96-64 bit buses.
They will compete with NVIDIA RTX 3050 and AMD Navi 24.Complementing the families will be adapters in the Pro variant: Arc A50 and Arc A40.
The first may use the ACM-G10 chip, and the second ACM-G11.Only the Intel Arc A780 remains unconfirmed.
There is speculation that it may be a \"Limited Edition\" model.This material was written by a site visitor, and it was rewarded.