Why it matters: The problematic launch of Arc Alchemist has given rise to rumors that Intel may abandon its attempts to become the third pillar in the discrete graphics card market. The company refutes these rumors, even though the internal reorganization reinforces rumors about the fate of future Intel GPUs.
Intel recently announced the split of its Accelerated Computing (AXG) group into two parts to better focus on the consumer and data center graphics markets. Raja Koduri, the founder of AXG, will once again become the chief architect of Intel, who will coordinate the work of the CPU, GP and AI divisions.
The consumer graphics group of the group responsible for Intel Arc discrete graphics cards will join the Intel Client computing group. Accelerated computing teams will join the group of data centers and artificial intelligence — another important corporate graphics processing market. Nvidia dominates both markets.
It’s easy to interpret this reorganization and reassignment as a bad sign for Arc GPUs, but Intel says it has no plans to abandon the brand. The company says it will continue to support the Alchemist line and still plans to release its successors – Battlemage and Celestial — in the coming years.
Intel had to postpone the release of Alchemist graphics cards several times before shipping them in mid-2022, and they did not have a significant impact on Nvidia and AMD’s market share. The Intel Arc 380 proved disappointing compared to other lower-end GPUs such as the AMD Radeon RX 6400 or Nvidia GTX 1650. Meanwhile, the Intel A750 and A770 compared somewhat favorably with Nvidia’s mid-range cards one and two years before, suggesting that delays lagged Intel. The curve.
After launch, one of the most notable weaknesses of Arc Alchemist was its disappointing performance in DirectX 11 and DirectX 9 games. Intel mainly focused on DirectX 12 performance to play the latest games, but many recent games still use DirectX 11. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is the most popular game on Steam, despite despite his age, he still uses DirectX 9. The company has had to play catch-up to improve performance in older games, but its extensive driver updates in this regard suggest that Intel is not giving up yet.
The chip giant has informed Tom’s Hardware that while it intends to release Battlemage, it has not yet set exact release dates. The delays plaguing Alchemist have taught Intel to be more careful with promises as they enter a new arena.
