Intel today surprised us with the reveal of its new high-performance gaming graphics brand, Intel Arc. Competing with the AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce brands, Arc enables Intel to take a stab at the gaming graphics market that's been a duopoly for the past 2 decades; and the company doesn't intend to only make low-cost e-sports chips. As if a statement of intent, the company revealed the codenamed of the first three generations of Arc: "Battlemage," "Celestial," and "Druid."

Of these "Battlemage" is likely the fancy new codename for the Xe HPG graphics architecture, which has been implemented in a working prototype referred to as the DG2, and which Intel is now referring to as "Alchemist." Intel revealed that "Battlemage" is being designed to meet DirectX 12 Ultimate requirements, which means it will support hardware-accelerated real-time raytracing; mesh shaders, sampler feedback, and variable-rate shading. Intel also announced that the chips will feature an AI-accelerated supersampling feature. This will rival NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR. Intel announced that the first consumer products based on the "Alchemist" silicon will release in the first quarter of 2022, the company will put out more specifics throughout 2021, in the run-up to this launch.