Why it matters: At the 2021 Game Awards this week, Intel dropped a 30-second teaser for its upcoming Arc dedicated graphics cards. The video covers nothing the company hasn’t revealed before, but it might be Arc’s most public showing yet.
The teaser shows a few games running on an unspecified Arc GPU, including Hitman, Age of Empires IV, and Back 4 Blood. Of course, Intel didn’t bother to compare Arc to an Nvidia or AMD GPU. The only clue that hints at performance is that the YouTube upload is 1440p and 30 frames per second. Recent Arc benchmarks haven’t been too impressive, but those cards were likely downclocked, so we don’t have accurate performance metrics yet.
On top of the footage, Intel mentions already-confirmed features like ray tracing and AI-powered image upscaling but doesn’t say whether the clips in the teaser are using those features. The video ends with a launch window in the second half of 2022, which we already expected.
None of what Intel showed was technically new, but many viewers of the Game Awards likely didn’t know Intel was working on its own graphics cards. The company has held presentations showing off their features, and rumors have hinted at other details, but there hasn’t been a lot of advertising. The teaser could be the beginning of a real PR debut for the Arc cards.