Intel demonstrated a desktop Arc Alchemist graphics card up and running at its Investor Meeting 2022 event on Thursday, a picture posted by Raja Koduri, Intel's graphics chief, shows. The demonstration further supports that Intel's DG2 family of desktop graphics cards is getting ready for launch in Q2 2022 and that the line-up will include boards that fit into enthusiast-grade Intel's NUC 11 Extreme 'Beast Canyon.'
The showcase of an Arc Canyon graphics card at an investors event sends a mixed message. On the one hand, Intel installed the board into its NUC 11 Extreme 'Beast Canyon' machine designed for enthusiast gamers and engineered to support the latest GeForce RTX 30 and Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards that are both long (up to 12 inches) and tall. On the other hand, demonstrating an upcoming graphics board using Shadow of the Tomb Raider game from 2018 is a bit strange. Perhaps, Intel wanted to demonstrate capabilities of its XeSS (Xe supersampling) AI-enhanced upscaling technology and create some kind of wow effect among the financial community, but there are newer titles to do that and these titles will look even better with XeSS.
In any case, the fact that Intel has Arc Alchemist graphics cards to show off publicly is generally a good sign. Intel has still has not announced any details about its go-to-market strategy for Arc Alchemist and which graphics boards makers will supply the actual cards, but maybe Intel will have a separate event for that.
The demonstration of a graphics card several months before its availability is a rare occurrence in current realities as two major GPU designers do not want to spoil sales of their existing offerings by showing soon-to-be-released products with higher performance and new features. But Intel does not have any enthusiast-grade graphics hardware on the market today, which is why it can showcase its next-generation cards in broad daylight.
