Intel Graphics late Wednesday released the Arc GPU Graphics Software 101.4578 beta. These drivers come with Game On (day-zero) optimization for the hottest game release of this Summer, "Baldur's Gate 3." Intel beat both AMD and NVIDIA to be the first with optimized drivers for the game. The fantasy RPG releases later today. Given that the game is very easy on system requirements, you can expect the entire span of Intel Arc "Alchemist" graphics card to be perfectly suited to the game. The Arc A380 should be able to max out the game at resolutions of 1080p, while the A750 and A770 should max it out at 1440p and 4K Ultra HD.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4578 beta

AMD Radeon RX 6000 and RX 700 series based on RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 GPU architectures have been benchmarked by folks over at ComputerBase. However, these weren't regular benchmarks of performance but rather power consumption. According to their latest results, they discovered that enabling Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) can lower the power consumption of AMD Radeon cards in idle. Using a 4K display with a 144 Hz refresh rate, ComputerBase benchmarked Radeon RX 6800/6700 XT and RX 7900 XT, both last-generation and current-generation graphics cards. The performance matrix also includes a comparison to Intel Arc A770, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3080, and RTX 4080.

Regarding performance figures, the tests compare desktop idle consumption, dual monitor power consumption, window movement, YouTube with SDR at 60 FPS, and YouTube with HDR at 60 FPS, all done on a 4K 144 Hz monitor setup. You can see the comparison below, with the most significant regression in power consumption being Radeon RX 7900 XTX using 81% less power in single and 71% less power in dual monitor setup.

Without fanfare, Intel has launched two new mobile GPUs in the shape of the Arc A570M and the A530M. The Arc A570M gets 16 Xe Cores and 256 execution units, as well as four render slices and 16 RT units. The lower-end Arc A530M gets to make do with 12 Xe cores, 192 execution units, three render slices and 12 RT units, which is a smaller cut than the model name suggests. What's interesting to note here is that the Arc A570M appears to have identical hardware specs to the Arc A550M that launched in the second quarter of 2022, although as we'll see, the clock speeds and TGP differ between the parts. The Arc A570M supports 8 GB of GDDR6 memory, the same as the Arc A550M, with the Arc A530M supports 4 or 8 GB of GDDR6.

Both the Arc A570M and the A530M will get a GPU clock speed of 1,300 MHz, which is a significant boost from the Arc A550M which is plodding along at a mere 900 MHz in comparison. This makes the two newcomers Intel's third highest clocked mobile GPUs, with only the Arc A770M and Arc A370M being clocked higher. The downside of this is an increase in TGP, where the Arc A550M had a fairly reasonable TGP of 60 Watts, the Arc A530M has a TGP range of 65 to 95 Watts, while the Arc A570M extends this to 75-95 Watts. The rest of the specs appear to carry over from the Arc A550M, so the new GPUs will support up to four displays via eDP, DP 2.0 or HDMI 2.1 and the full set of video encoders and decoders are also supported. The new additions are still made using TSMC's N6 node, so what we're looking at are most likely just optimised silicon here, which has led Intel to be able to boost the clock speeds while maintaining acceptable thermals.

Intel Graphics today released the latest version of the Intel Arc GPU Graphics drivers. Version 101.4577 WHQL comes with support for the new Arc A570M and A530M mobile GPUs. Besides this, the drivers fix an issue with F1 23 where notebooks with certain Arc A-series mobile GPUs experience an application crash. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4577 WHQL

Intel's Alchemist engineering team has been working on improving its open-source Vulkan drivers for Linux—recent coverage from Phoronix shows that Team Blue's hard work is paying off, especially in the area of gaming performance. The site's founder, Michael Larabel, approves of the latest Mesa work produced by Intel engineers, and has commended them on their efforts to better the Arc Graphics family. His mid-month testings—on a Linux 6.4-based system running an Intel Arc A770 GPU—demonstrated a "~10% speed-up for the Intel Arc Graphics on Linux." He has benchmarked this system again over the past weekend, following the release of a new set of optimizations for Mesa 23.3-devel: "The latest performance boost for Intel graphics on Linux is by supporting the I915_FORMAT_MOD_4_TILED_DG2_RC_CCS modifier. Indeed it's panning out nicely for furthering the Intel Arc Graphics Vulkan performance."

He apologized for the limited selection of games, due to: "the Intel Linux graphics driver still not having sparse support in place, but at least that will hopefully be here in the coming months when the Intel Xe kernel driver is upstreamed. Another recent promising development for the Intel open-source graphics driver support is fake sparse support to at least help some games and that code will hopefully be merged soon." First up was Counter-Strike: Global Offensive—thanks to the optimized Vulkan drivers it: "enjoyed another nice boost to the performance as a result of this latest code. For CS Linux gamers, it's great seeing the 21% boost just over the past month."

An MSI Arc A310 4 GB Low Profile 2X graphics card is now available to purchase at a couple of Russian PC hardware retailers (for roughly $140), and a local YouTuber has already produced a quick unboxing video. Intel's board partners have been sluggish in adopting lower-end Alchemist GPU variants, with only a handful of companies bothering to produce cards based on the Arc A310 (DG2-128).

Sparkle displayed an unnamed super compact model at Computex 2023, and presentation slides have recently revealed that their "Industrial Low-Profile" series will be introduced under the GENIE moniker, comprised of single slot/fan A310 and A380 variants. Sparkle has not outlined a possible Western release for these budget cards, and other manufacturers have been reluctant to move beyond the Chinese OEM market. The Gigabyte A3 series is reportedly a Russian market exclusive for the moment, so it will be interesting to see if MSI is only targeting that territory with its competing dual fan design Arc A310 4 GB Low Profile model.

Without a formal announcement, or even a product page on its website, ASRock has quietly released a 16 GB version of its Arc A770 Phantom Gaming graphics card. The company's A770 lineup has just the one model—the Phantom Gaming OC, with 8 GB of 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory across the GPU's 256-bit memory interface. The new 16 GB model would be among very few of its kind being released by Intel's board partners, in an attempt to make the A770 an attractive option for those in the market for 1080p thru 1440p capable graphics cards.

Intel's reference designs for the Arc 7 series included the A770 Limited Edition, a card with 16 GB of 17.5 Gbps GDDR6 memory, while the plan originally was for 8 GB of 16 Gbps memory to be the standard memory configuration for the A770. It remains to be seen if the new ASRock Phantom Gaming OC is using 17.5 Gbps memory, or 16 Gbps. The only other 16 GB A770 custom design graphics card available in the West has to be the Acer Predator Arc A770 BiFrost 16 GB. The ASRock A770 16 GB PG was discovered on US retailer Newegg, where it was listed for $329.

Intel Arc A750 graphics card has been regularly shown by its designers to be comparable to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 in terms of performance, making it a formidable DirectX 12 Ultimate-capable 1080p-class gaming graphics card, with each of its new driver release ironing out game-specific performance issues. An ASRock A750 custom-design graphics card is now listed on Newegg for $199, with a coupon shaving off a further $20. At $179, the A750 is hard to pass, considering that other cards from its class are a bit pricier. The cheapest Radeon RX 6650 XT is currently going for $240, and the cheapest RTX 3060 (12 GB original spec) for $280.

According to information and images released by Xfastest, Acer seems to be preparing a new trio of Predator BiFrost custom cards. The series is currently limited to a single factory overclocked model, based on Intel's Arc A770 16 GB GPU. One of the new cards seems to be a cheaper (~$258) A750 8 GB BiFrost model, so Acer's Alchemist ACM-G10 GPU variant lineup is welcoming one addition.

Acer is also embracing RDNA 3 courtesy of AMD, although graphics card enthusiasts could see the introduction of two new Predator BiFrost models based on Radeon RX 7600 8 GB GPU as less than exciting prospects. The leaked photos seem to show a cooler design that lacks ARGB around the two cooling fans—budget friendly pricing (~$290 for the overclocked model, and ~$258 for non-OC) suggests that fancy livery is not so important in the low-to-mid-range tier.

With the launches of GeForce RTX 4060 and Radeon RX 7600, the Intel Arc 7-series finds itself being a tough sell, pushing Intel Arc board partners such as Acer to clear out their inventory at deep discounts. The Acer Predator Arc A770 BiFrost graphics card sees its price slashed to $281, down from its $399 launch price. The premium custom-design card features a unique lateral+axial air based cooling solution that's studded with RGB lighting. The Acer Predator BiFrost is also one of the very few custom-design A770 cards to feature 16 GB of 17 Gbps GDDR6 memory, much like the Intel Limited Edition reference-design, most other custom-design cards come with 8 GB of 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory.

ASRock has added another Arc model to its small selection of Intel graphics cards—this time in low profile form. The entry level A380 GPU is well suited for this narrow (zero dB/silent) dual fan cooling solution due to its diminutive 75 W TDP rating. ASRock has stayed in the safe zone by sticking with the default base clock of 2.0 GHz, as opposed to the sibling Challenger ITX 6 GB OC model's slightly more ambitious 2.25 GHz.

The specifications are typical A380—you get 6 GB of GDDR6 VRAM with a 96-bit memory bus, granting a bandwidth going up to 186 GB/s (memory is clocked at 15.5 Gbps), although the selection of ports has been reduced in number due to the card's small stature. Only single DisplayPort 2.0 and HDMI 2.0b connections here. ASRock's product page for their Arc A380 Low Profile model includes the usual yammering about the GPU's "next-gen gaming" capabilities thanks to Intel's Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) technology, but the card is better suited for compact budget builds and users who require a decent level of AV1 encoding (for the price—not announced at the time of writing).

Sparkle Computer and Intel, longstanding Thunderbolt development partner since 2015, have announced a new partnership to launch the SPARKLE Intel Arc Series Graphics Cards. With a wealth of experience producing quality industrial graphics cards, ODM solutions and peripherals, Sparkle is now expanding our reach into the consumer graphics business.

"We value this collaboration and we are fully prepared," says Willie Huang, General Manager of Sparkle Computer Co., LTD. "Sparkle is dedicated to creating a creator-friendly working environment, ranging from industrial graphics, external GPU to docking stations.... As the last piece of the puzzle, Sparkle Intel Arc Graphics, featuring an advanced Xe Media engine and AV1 encoder, has fully completed our product line and fulfilled the requirement of the desktop community"

Intel on Wednesday released the latest version of its Arc GPU Graphics Drivers. Version 101.4514 beta includes a handful performance updates. To begin with, it adds optimization for "AEW: Fight Forever," and "Layers of Fear." "Assassin's Creed Unity" is playable, with the drivers providing a 271% performance uplift at 1080p, and 313% uplift at 1440p, as tested using an A770 graphics card. F1 22 sees some performance uplifts: at 1080p with High settings, one can expect up to 36% improvement in frame-rates. At 1440p with High settings, up to 20% uplifts can be had. At 1080p with Ultra High settings and ray tracing enabled, up to 10% uplifts can be had. "Deathloop" is the third game with major performance uplifts—up to 10% at 1080p with Ultra settings; and up to 8% at 1440p with Very High settings.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4514

Intel Graphics has released Arc GPU and Iris Xe Graphics Drivers version 101.4502 WHQL. There are no gaming highlights or brand new Game On Driver support included in this release, according to the notes. An Arc-related iTunes application crash (upon launch) has been fixed, as well as blank screen and error messages encountered in Microsoft Edge's WebView2. There are plenty of "Known Issues" listed this time—Intel and EA Sports are looking into a problem where adjustments to XeSS presets cause crashes in F1 2023. Corruption in Game Capture mode for Dota 2 (via XSplit Broadcaster) has been noted. Media playback and encoding with some versions of Adobe Premiere Pro cannot utilize GPU hardware acceleration.

There are also various in-game issues - for owners of Intel Core Processors - logged for these titles: Total War: Warhammer III (DX11), Call of Duty Warzone 2.0 (DX12), Conqueror's Blade (DX12) and A Plague Tale: Requiem. The Arc Control Performance Tuning app is still in Beta, so expect to encounter some inconsistencies when using it. Intel and Cooler Master have partnered up on the continued development of Arc's RGB Controller software—it is custom designed "to allow users to harness 90 individually addressable LEDs on Intel Arc A770 Graphics Limited Edition cards."

DOWNLOAD: Intel GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4502 WHQL

Intel issued a product change notification (PCN), announcing the discontinuation of the reference-design Arc A770 16 GB Limited Edition graphics card. The product is now marked end-of-life (EOL) from Intel's end. What this means is that retailers cannot order more of it from Intel. The Arc A770 has 8 GB as its standard video memory size, and in its reference spec, uses 8 GB of 16 Gbps-rated GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus. The first-party A770 Limited Edition card comes with 16 GB of faster 17.5 Gbps memory. Memory aside, both the A770 Limited Edition, and custom-design A770 graphics cards have the same GPU core-configuration.

Intel Graphics today released the latest version of Arc GPU Graphics Drivers. Version 101.4499 beta adds optimization for F1 23, Aliens: Dark Descent, Forever Skies, and Counter Strike 2. There are major performance uplifts to be had. Counter Strike 2 sees up to 8% uplift at 1440p with high settings, and up to 10% at 1080p with Very High settings. F1 23 players can expect up to 33% uplift at 1080p with Ultra High settings and RT on, and an 18% uplift with RT off; and a 27% uplift at 1440p with high settings. Intel also updated its Destiny 2 optimization, with a neat 11% uplift to be had at 1080p with the highest settings. An error or black screen seen on applications embedding WebView2 frames, has been fixed.

DOWNLOAD: Intel GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4499 Beta

Intel Arc graphics have dedicated AI hardware built-in. Leveraging those capabilities for gaming gets the most performance possible out of Arc GPUs, and that's exactly what Xe Super Sampling does. Let's look closer: when you turn on XeSS, every frame the GPU renders starts at a lower size than your target resolution. That smaller image renders quickly, then XeSS steps in. XeSS uses a trained AI model combined with motion vectors and frame history to intelligently upscale frames to full HD, 1440p, or 4K. Got all that? The sausage-making can get pretty technical, but the important thing is turning XeSS on scales games to high resolutions faster than traditional rendering could.

FPS numbers aren't the only thing we're increasing: over fifty games now include XeSS, from the biggest franchises to your niche favorites. When we launched the Intel Arc A750 and A770, we showed how XeSS works to boost FPS in nine popular games with over a dozen more on the way. Now with our high-performance desktop GPUs out for half a year, our game developer friends have helped deliver even more AI-fueled upscaling to over fifty new and existing games. A full list of every game and demo with XeSS included is at the bottom of this article.

According to a new research report from the analyst firm Jon Peddie Research, unit shipments in the add-in board (AIB) market decreased in Q1 2023 by -12.6% and decreased by -38.2% year to year. Intel increased its add-in board market share by 2% during the first quarter.

The percentage of AIBs in desktop PCs is referred to as the attach rate. The attach rate grew from last quarter by 8% but was down -21% year to year. Approximately 6.3 million add-in boards shipped in Q1 2023. The market shares for the desktop discrete GPU suppliers shifted in the quarter, as AMD's market share remained flat from last quarter. Intel, which entered the AIB market in Q3'22 with the Arc A770 and A750, gained 2% in market share, while Nvidia retains its dominant position in the add-in board space with an 84% market share.

Today, Intel introduced the Intel Arc Pro A60 and Pro A60M as new members of the Intel Arc Pro A-series professional range of graphics processing units (GPUs). The new products are a significant step up in performance in the Intel Arc Pro family and are carefully designed for professional workstations users with up to 12 GB of video memory (VRAM) and support for four displays with high dynamic range (HDR) and Dolby Vision support.

With built-in ray tracing hardware, graphics acceleration and machine learning capabilities, the Intel Arc Pro A60 GPU unites fluid viewports, the latest in visual technologies and rich content creation in a traditional single slot factor.

Sparkle already announced that it will be coming up with the Intel Arc graphics card lineup soon, and it came to the Computex 2023 show in force, showing some rather impressive graphics cards, including the Arc A770 Watercooling concept, a couple of custom TITAN OC Edition graphics cards, and the A370 MXM version.

Sparkle's Intel Arc lineup starts off with some industrial low-profile graphics cards based on Intel Arc A310 and Arc A380 graphics cards, as well as standard Mini-ITX size ELF series versions which will be based on the same GPUs. Sparkle is also working on an Intel Arc A370 MXM GPU for laptops, which is a nice surprise. The main part of the showcase were certainly Sparkle's Intel Arc ORC and TITAN OC Edition custom versions of the Intel Arc A750 and Arc A770 chips. The biggest surprise though was the custom Sparkle A770 Watercooling concept. Sparkle is definitely serious in joining the Intel Arc team with Acer, ASRock, GUNNIR, Gigabyte, MSI and others, so hopefully we'll see some of these graphics cards on retail/e-tail shelves soon.

Naughty Dog and Iron Galaxy have released the v1.0.5.1 Patch for the PC version of The Last of Us Part 1, bringing general and AMD GPU stability improvements, and fixing issues seen with all Intel Arc GPUs.

According to the rather short release notes, the newest update brings general stability improvements, fixes crashes on boot that were seen on all Intel Arc GPUs, as well as brings stability improvements for some AMD GPUs during an extended playthrough. Naughty Dog was keen to note that they are still closely watching for reports to support future improvements and patches, as well as actively optimizing, working on game stability, and implementing additional fixes that will be included in future updates.

Newegg has reduced the asking price for Intel's Arc A750 Limited Edition 8 GB graphics card - this reference model is now available at an all-time low of $199. It is too early to tell whether this a permanent discount or just a seasonal sale - but the online retailer could be reacting (in advance) to the launches of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4060 (in July) and 4060 Ti models, as well as AMD's Radeon RX 7600 GPU lineup later this week.

Team Blue is putting a lot of effort into getting the hardware buying public to adopt its first generation of A-series/Alchemist discrete graphics cards - including the premiere of a slightly bizarre marketing campaign last week, called "Arc Balanced Builds." Intel has been navigating a market long dominated by NVIDIA and AMD, where plenty of folks have welcomed a third player on the field - but the Arc series experienced a much delayed and rough launch process last year. Intel has seemingly committed to next generation graphics technologies, with its Battlemage and Celestial architectures speculated to be in-progress at the company's AXG division.

Intel has published its latest blog post, announcing the Intel Arc Balanced Builds, an initiative that pairs up Intel Arc GPUs with Intel Core CPUs, creating balanced configurations that match Intel Arc graphics cards to the "best-fitting" Intel Core CPU. Starting at $423 for the GPU and CPU and $899 for the full system, Intel claims these combinations come from thousands of test runs and hundreds of hours in the lab, leading up to 15,000 datapoints and 22 GB of data.

According to Intel's own testing, which includes a wide variety of Intel Core processors in different configurations and games, there is a perfect CPU range for both its entry level Intel Arc A380 graphics card, as well as the Intel Arc A750 and Arc A770 graphics cards. Of course, for those with a big or unlimited budget, there is always the best configuration that money can buy, but making a balanced build is what makes sense for many others.

According to leaked details, it appears that ASRock is preparing at least three custom versions of the upcoming Radeon RX 7600 graphics card, including Phantom Gaming, Challenger, and Steel Legend series. The list of ASRock custom Radeon RX 7600 graphics cards comes from the ECC listing, and these three are listed among some other yet to be announced graphics cards.

As you can see from the list below, ASRock will have three Radeon RX 7600 versions, all of which are factory-overclocked. The Phantom Gaming version should be a more premium model, while the Challenger and Steel Legend should be closer to MSRP. The Steel Legend is a novelty in ASRock's graphics card lineup, and we expect a similar silver design found on ASRock's Steel Legend motherboards. The list also includes the recently announced Radeon RX 7900 XT Taichi White and a low profile Intel Arc A380 graphics card.

In a blog post, NVIDIA claims that its AV1 video encoder is vastly superior in terms of quality, compared to both AMD and Intel's alternatives. The still shot provided by NVIDIA to show its superior quality over its competitors, was encoded at 4K60p, obviously using the AV1 codec. Nvidia used its own GeForce RTX 4080 card and compared it to an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and an Intel Arc A770, with all three cards encoding the video at 12 Mbps using the latest release of OBS Studio.

It just so happens that OBS Studio 29.1 added support for AV1 over the Enhanced Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) and now allows for live streaming using AV1 to YouTube. This is also the main reason for the NVIDIA blog post, as prior to this release, it wasn't possible to stream using AV1 in OBS Studio. NVIDIA has been known for the quality of its video encoder for quite some time, but we'd like to see some independent testing before we give NVIDIA the win here, especially as the company has only provided a single screenshot as proof of its superiority.