So chances are you saw the seismic news yesterday that Intel and Nvidia announced a partnership to develop x86 chips together — including a CPU with RTX graphics built-in for PC gaming.
One of the biggest questions coming out from that is simple: does this mean that Arc is cooked? Is Intel’s own GPU efforts on the chopping block. Well, Intel told PCWorld that “the collaboration is complementary to Intel’s roadmap and Intel will continue to have GPU product offerings."
In one way, that’s a big old sigh of relief from me. But also, just because a company says one thing now doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future, and I’m nervous.
Get on the Arc
For those uninitiated, Arc is Intel’s name for the company’s graphics work, and it’s been quite a journey to get to this point. Over years of rather middling GPU tech, we’re now at a point where Intel has been making some serious moves.
First is the big wins in discrete GPUs for desktop. The Intel Arc B580 is easily one of my favorite budget graphics cards — not giving you the feeling of being short-changed on video memory by giving you 12GB of VRAM for $249.
And on top of that, updates are continuing to roll in to improve XeSS: its AI frame generation and resolution scaling tech. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not close to what DLSS 4 is capable of, but it’s still strong.
Second is in handheld gaming. Only one exists at the moment: the MSI Claw 8 AI+, and at first the performance and power efficiency were a little out of whack, but the Arc graphics built into that Intel Core Ultra 7 258V have grown to be mightily impressive — giving AMD a run for its money in my own testing.
Plus, let's not forget these chips are used in laptops too, and the GPU capabilities on AAA games is surprisingly strong.
But this seems too convenient
This is what has me feeling pretty suspicious of the comments being made. Before the lifelines coming from the U.S. Government and Nvidia, Intel was in a hole, and there’s still a lot to be done to climb back out. We’ve already seen the lengths the company is having to go — cutting many thousands of jobs and streamlining efforts by canceling projects.
No matter how much I’ve been impressed by the advancements in GPU tech by Team Blue, the company has let a Green elephant into the room, and these two having competing roadmaps doesn’t seem like the most logical thing to do.
The most logical thing to do (though it pains me to say it) is to realign behind the CPU efforts and let Nvidia bring the graphics to the table. I hope I’m wrong, because Intel’s moves in budget PC gaming cards and the handheld space have been awesome to watch. But we’ll see.
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