Intel’s Next Gen Arc-B ‘Battlemage’ and Arc-C ‘Celestial’ Already In Production, Better Ray Tracing Performance Than NVIDIA
Intel’s Arc A GPUs didn’t have the best start as we all know. Discussing the fate of these GPUs with PC Gamer, team blue gave us some insight regarding the current state of development and future plans.
The Arc Disaster
Intel’s Arc A GPUs were initially planned for Q1 2022. Spoiler alert, the initial deadline was over 6 months ago. Intel then promised a Summer release date which is ending in around 30 days.
It’s clear that team blue requires a few more months for its Arc A series. The A380 has only been launched in a few countries and just recently became available in the US.
Focus On Next-Gen
While most of the company’s focus is heavily on the current A-series, a few members and groups have been assigned to work on the upcoming Battlemage and Celestial series. This shows that Intel is here to stay and despite having a slow start, they are just warming up for the mainstream market.
The team has done a great job thus far in driver optimization as a recent report shows that ‘most’ games run flawlessly on the Arc GPUs. The Arc-B ‘Battlemage’ GPUs are set to arrive in 2023–2024 whereas we should expect the Arc-C ‘Celestial’ lineup to hit the shelves by 2024.
We’re not going anywhere on our discrete business. And our discrete business is the basic technology development that goes both into the data center and integrated GPUs. I feel like there’s a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) out there. I’d just like to be clear: we’re not going anywhere.
~Tom Peterson
NVIDIA In Trouble
Intel’s Arc A750 performs better than the RTX 3060 while reportedly costing less. Team blue then states that DX12 and Vulkan performance will be top notch, however, DX10 and DX11 will be a hit or a miss.
When you have a title that is optimized for Intel, in the sense that it runs well on DX12, you’re gonna get performance that’s significantly above an [RTX] 3060. And this is A750 compared to a 3060, so 17%, 14%, 10%. It’s going to vary of course based on the title.
~Tom Peterson
Tom Peterson makes a massive claim that Ray Tracing on Intel dGPUs will be on par or even better than NVIDIA’s offerings. That’s massive because NVIDIA was the first in the Ray tracing game. Can Intel prove its claims? Possibly, however, NVIDIA’s DLSS technology may give it a massive advantage. Deep learning takes a while and Intel’s XeSS technology has been around for a very short period of time in comparison to FSR and DLSS.
The RTU [ray tracing unit] that we have is particularly well suited for delivering real ray tracing performance. And you’ll see that when you do ray tracing on comparisons with an [RTX] 3060 versus A750 or A770, we should fare very, very well.
Yeah, we’re definitely competitive or better than Nvidia with ray tracing hardware.
~Tom Peterson
