A few days ago, Intel announced its first official discrete graphics card efforts, designed for laptops. Called the Arc Alchemist lineup, Intel has designed these SKUs to provide entry-level to high-end options covering a wide range of use cases. Today, AMD has responded with a rather exciting Tweet made by the company's @Radeon Twitter account. The company compared Intel's Arc Alchemist A370M GPU with AMD's Radeon RX 6500M mobile SKUs in the post. These GPUs are made on TSMC's N6 node, feature 4 GB GDDR6 64-bit memory, 1024 FP32 cores, and have the same configurable TDP range of 35-50 Watts.

Below, you can see AMD's benchmarks of the following select games: Hitman 3, Total War Saga: Troy, F1 2021, Strange Brigade (High), and Final Fantasy XIV. The Radeon RX 6500M GPU manages to win in all of these games, thus explaining AMD's "FTW" hashtag on Twitter. Remember that these are vendor-supplied benchmarks runs, so we have to wait for some media results to surface.

Today, AMD released their Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.8.2 Beta drivers. This latest driver release brings with it support and improvements for numerous titles. A Total War Saga: Troy sees the most significant boost to performance with up to 12% better FPS on the High preset when using a Radeon RX 5700 XT. Other titles with improved support include Microsoft Flight Simulator, Mortal Shell, and the Marvel's Avengers Open Beta. Meanwhile, AMD's list of fixes while short is no less important. They managed to solve the issue with intermittent system hangs when exiting sleep on some AMD Ryzen 3000 mobile processors with Radeon Graphics, which will likely make life easier for numerous users. They also fixed the system freeze or failure to recognize input from the user when pressing a key with Radeon Overlay open or when exiting it while playing Hyper Scape. The full list of features and improvements can be found in the list below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.8.2 Beta

Total War Saga: Troy is the latest title from Creative Assembly which recently launched on the Epic Games Store and was free to keep for the first 24 hours. The game was claimed by over 7.5 million people in this initial 24 hour period with 1 million claims within the first hour alone. The giveaway exceeded the expectations of Creative Assembly who wanted to introduce their games to a wider audience. The giveaway was made possible through a partnership with Epic Games and means that the game will remain an Epic Games Store exclusive until August 13th, 2021 when it launches on Steam. If you missed the giveaway and want to purchase the game it is currently available for £35/$50.

(Update 13AUG2020: The game is now available for free on the EPIC Games Store platform, so make sure to go there and add it your basket STAT.)

Here's EPIC kicking up its free game offerings up several notches at once. Sega and Creative Assembly, developers of the user and critically-acclaimed Total War videogames, have announced that their latest release on that series, titled Total War Saga: Troy, will be available on launch day, August 13th, when it launches exclusively on EPIC Games Store. Based on Homers' Illiad, "A Total War Saga: TROY focuses on the historical flashpoint of the Trojan War, bringing the conflict to life as never before."

A caveat: the game will only be available for free in the first 24 hours following launch. Any claims after that will be met with the games' real price-tag. How's that for EPIC Games Store exclusivity deals? Check the games' trailer and confirmation of this promotion after the break.