The flagship Intel Arc Alchemist graphics card hits 2.4 GHz in a new OpenCL benchmark. Nonetheless, the DG2 graphics card was still no match for Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3070 (Ampere), one of the best graphics cards on the market.
Barring any setbacks, Intel's DG2 family of discrete desktop graphics cards will arrive in the second quarter of the year. The flagship Arc Alchemist SKU will wield up to 512 execution units (EUs) and up to 16GB of GDDR6 memory. The graphics card has scaled up to 2.4 GHz in the new Geekbench 5 submission (via Benchleaks), likely the graphics card's boost clock. But, of course, it's an engineering sample, so the clock speed isn't final.
If we look at the performance on paper, the flagship Arc Alchemist should deliver around 20 TFLOPs of FP32 performance. Of course, it's not the best metric for gaming, but it's the only information available. Based on the FP32 performance, the DG2-512 theoretically performs similar to the often referenced GeForce RTX 3070. The AMD equivalent would be Radeon RX 6700 XT (Big Navi).
The Arc Alchemist scored 85,448 points in the OpenCL test, which isn't the best indicator of gaming performance, of course. Nevertheless, the level of performance would put the flagship Arc Alchemist in the same alley as the GeForce RTX 2070 as far as OpenCL workloads go. If we compared it to Nvidia's latest offerings, Intel's graphics card is around 40% slower than the GeForce RTX 3070. Being engineering samples and unreleased hardware, we should take the performance figures with a truckload of salt.
In another benchmark, a similar DG2-512 sample, which maxed out at 2.1 GHz, had surpassed Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3070 Ti in some workloads. It would seem that Intel has been making progress in optimizing the Arc Alchemist's clock speeds. The early rumors pointed to a 2.4 GHz to 2.5 GHz maximum boost clock for the flagship DG2 part.
The only benchmark that's remotely close to a gaming workload came in the shape of an Ashes of the Singularity submission back in December. However, a mysterious Arc Alchemist sample had put up numbers that were very close to a GeForce RTX 3070, which lends some credence to the rumor that the DG2-512 SKU could potentially offer gaming performance that's close to Nvidia's mid-range performers.
