It turns out that Intel’s graphics cards are better at doing AI than they are at churning out ultra-high frame rates in games.
Proponents of generative AI would often have you believe that such systems are all about making serious improvements to your productivity and work. But for owners of Arc graphics cards, Intel believes you should just have fun and mess around with it. To that end, it has released a beta version of AI Playground, a free and open-source application that lets you use your Alchemist GPU to generate and edit AI images and talk nonsense with a chatbot.
Intel first teased AI Playground at Computex, earlier this year, and now a public beta version of the app is available to download for Windows. You’ll need an Arc graphics card with 8 GB or more of VRAM—it won’t run on any other GPU, unfortunately.
The installation will pull a copy of Python off the Internet if you don’t have it already installed. If you do have Python on your gaming PC and AI Playground crashes when you run it, it’s probably a version conflict and the only option to resolve the problem, at the moment, is to remove all instances of Python you currently have.
AI Playground’s main features are the text-to-image and image-to-image generative tools that use Stable Diffusion 1.5 as the primary model of choice.
