Intel dropped an incredible amount of information at its Architecture Day 2021 event last week. Bit-Tech reported on the big consumer-facing news nuggets; Alder Lake CPUs, and Arc Alchemist GPUs. Furthermore, we took the time to describe an important technology for Intel GPU users who intend to game on the Xe HPG architecture graphics cards they will be able to buy from Q1 2022 onwards – the XeSS Ai-powered upscaling technology.
The ‘software first’ slide reproduced above was part of the presentation last week, in a segment hosted by Intel graphics software engineering director, Lisa Pierce. Hopefully the quality, reliability and extensive features we expect from modern GPU drivers will be there from the dawn of the Arc Alchemist series.
On Monday, Intel Client Graphics Products and Solutions VP, Roger Chandler, wrote an Architecture Day follow-up blog post about Intel Arc High Performance Graphics on Medium. In his post, Chandler recaps on all the most important aspects of Intel Arc Alchemist; its hardware features, the underlying architecture, and the roadmap of coming advancements. Interestingly, he mentions overclocking for the first time, too.
Towards the end of his Xe HPG and Arc Alchemist article, Chandler talks about how he expects users to put multiple demands on these powerful consumer graphics cards. One highlighted use case he made regarded gamer/creators – probably games streamers – who need processing power to handle multiple streams of data in/out, while keeping everything running silky smooth at high resolutions and quality levels. For such demanding users and enthusiasts, Intel is “integrating overclocking controls into the driver UI,” wrote the Intel exec. AMD has similar OC and tuning functionality in its Radeon driver suite, but Nvidia leaves OC to third party tools like MSI Afterburner. It is good to see Intel follow the former with this integrated feature.