Intel has finally released its Arc Alchemist graphics cards. Here’s everything we know about Intel Arc Alchemist’s release date, performance, and specs.
Intel’s first-generation Arc graphics cards are here — codenamed Alchemist. It’s a bid to shift the balance that Nvidia and AMD have maintained for decades, with modern furnishings like real-time ray tracing and AI-assisted supersampling. To get you up to speed, we rounded up everything we know about Arc Alchemist’s release date, price, specs, and performance.
Although Arc Alchemist cards are technically here, they aren’t widely available. Intel has been slowly rolling out these cards. That’s about to change, though, because Intel has officially unveiled the cards during the Intel Innovation event and shared all the important details.
After a long wait and a lot of delays, Intel has finally announced the release date of Arc Alchemist for desktops, namely the Arc A770. The GPU will arrive on October 12, which is, coincidentally, the same day as the new Nvidia flagship, the RTX 4090. The prices will start at just $330 for Intel’s own Limited Edition cards and may be higher for the custom versions from Intel’s partners.
Over the months leading up to the release of the Arc A770, Intel has emphasized that it plans to stay competitive in terms of pricing. That is its plan for beating the competition — lower prices with decent performance as opposed to targeting the high-end enthusiast segment just yet. For that reason, Intel has priced the A770 very competitively, and it made a strong statement by telling gamers: “You should be frustrated.”
We don’t know when, or if, Intel is planning to release the lower-tier Arc A750 and Arc A580 for desktops. In all likelihood, at least the A750 will release on the same day, but Intel focused on the flagship this time around.
Launching Arc Alchemist has been a herculean task for Intel. Intel officially launched Arc Alchemist at CES 2022, but only the mobile range. After that, Intel said that over 50 laptop and desktop designs were “coming soon,” but we haven’t seen too many yet. The company has confirmed that one Arc Alchemist laptop is shipping in South Korea, but even though it’s been a while, these laptops haven’t become widespread. You can, however, find some of them globally.
Rumors suggest that the slip in release date is a consequence of internal delays. Shortly after Intel’s CES keynote, the company removed the release window from the Arc Alchemist website. Rumors have circulated that Intel delayed the release over issues with management. The cards were originally set to launch in the first quarter of 2022, which Intel just barely made by releasing the range on March 31.
The desktop GPUs suffered numerous delays, too, with an ever-moving launch window that slipped past Intel’s estimates of “the summer of 2022.” However, we now have a concrete date and a very promising price to go with it.
Intel has now revealed full details for both the Arc Alchemist mobile lineup and the desktop range. While we’re not sure when some of these desktop GPUs will be available, we expect them to launch soon, alongside the flagship.
Here’s a look at the mobile range of Arc Alchemist GPUs:
It’s impossible to compare Arc Alchemist’s specs to options from AMD and Nvidia, outside of memory size and power draw. With 16GB of GDDR6 memory and a 256-bit bus, the flagship Arc 7 770M looks like it will line up with Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Ti mobile. AMD doesn’t have any options with quite as much memory.
On the low end, the Arc A350M doesn’t have a direct competitor from AMD or Nvidia, at least based on the spec sheet.
