With its ARC GPU portfolio, Intel is following AMD’s lead, and if Alchemist was their RDNA 1 moment, Battlemage will be their RDNA 2 moment, aiming for the enthusiast gaming market. We gain some early information about Intel’s DG3 or Battlemage family of GPUs nicknamed ‘Elasti’ in the newest video broadcast by Moore’s Law is Dead.
To begin with, we have a remark from MLID’s sources stating that the DG3 ARC Battlemage GPUs will be aimed at the high-end market. Intel is now a few months away from releasing its DG2 ARC Alchemist GPUs, which will compete with AMD’s (Radeon RX 6000) and NVIDIA’s (Radeon RX 8000) mainstream and high-end graphics cards (GeForce RTX 30).
The most we’ve heard is that the ARC Alchemist A*** series will be on par with or significantly better than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and AMD Radeon RX 6800/6700 XT in terms of performance. As you can see, they aren’t enthusiast-level performance, but Intel is aftermarket share right now, and you don’t get that through enthusiast devices, so mainstream and entry-level alternatives are the way to go. Consider what AMD did with their first-generation RDNA (Navi 1x) graphics cards, which targeted the mid-tier market initially before launching RDNA 2 (Navi 2x) graphics cards.
Intel’s DG2 ARC Alchemist will also give the first genuine gaming drivers on its initiative, according to the company. NVIDIA and AMD have spent years optimizing their current gaming drivers, so getting Intel’s first discrete gaming GPUs on par with the competition is a significant achievement. With that said, Intel is more confident in ARC than ever before, and while 2022 is only the beginning, it appears like 2023 will be ARC’s year. In reality, all of the driver development for DG2 GPUs is being done for the next generation of enthusiast products.
Intel may be considering a Tiled-GPU approach for its next-gen DG3 solutions, according to an interesting remark from one of MLID’s sources. With its RDNA 3 series, AMD is slated to offer a multi-chipset graphics architecture, and Intel could be the second GPU supplier to do so. As we’ve seen with Meteor Lake CPUs getting a Tile design with independent CPU/GPU/SOC IPs, this will also be the path for integrated graphics. Meteor Lake CPUs and later, with next-gen ARC GPUs, are expected to leave AMD in the dust on the mobile platform. AMD will update its Ryzen APUs with RDNA 2 GPU cores next month, which will result in a significant performance boost, therefore Intel’s actual answer will arrive in 2023.
Intel, according to reports, does not consider AMD to be a competitor, and their aim with the ARC Battlemange GPUs is NVIDIA Ada Lovelace. The green team is expected to release its next-gen by the end of 2022, so the DG3 launch in mid-2023 will give NVIDIA a 6-month head start, although Intel could overcome this by correctly pricing their graphics cards. Intel may also consider making their roadmap more aggressive so that their next launch is closer to AMD and NVIDIA’s next-generation parts rather than being half a year late.
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