From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action


Intel ARC, that is. Or even more precisely, discrete GPU cards that
utilize the Intel ARC architecture. News coming from Intel suggests
that the corporation is no longer interested in developing separate
video cards that would compete in that market against nvidia or AMD.

Which is sort of a shame. ARC was never a high-end option, but its
discrete cards punched far above its weight-class, offering
decent-enough performance for significantly less money. No, you
wouldn't be getting GeForce 5090 RTX performance, but even 1080 RTX
isn't too bad if you're paying a quarter of the price. The latest
Battlemage B70 discrete card itself was fairly capable, roughly on par
with an nvidia 5060 TI 16GB. The B70 --Intel's flagship card-- sold
for ~$400 to 500 USD (more for the 32GB versions), compared to the
roughly $600 for the nvidia cards. Intel's lesser models were priced
even better without major performance drops.

And the industry needs more competition, not less. I wouldn't have
wanted an ARC on my main machine, but as the GPU for my back-up PC? It
would have been fine... and cost a lot less. Assuming you could ever
find one of the things.

The ARC technology isn't going totally to waste, of course; from the
start it has also been integrated into Intel's chipsets. But the
nature of integrated tech is that you will never get the same amount
of performance from a SOC as you would from a discrete card that has
its own RAM, cooling and power.

ARC never really got off the ground, of course; most gamers will never
even have heard of it. Steam's hardware surveys indicate less than 1%
of gamers have the things installed. Production levels of the discrete
Intel ARC cards were always low, and Intel didn't do much to promote
the cards either, being more interested in their system-on-a-card
solutions.

[After all, why just sell a video-card that can be used on
an AMD x64 system when instead you can lock people into an
Intel ecosystem and make them use your CPU, GPU and
motherboard designs?]

But --especially the way the industry is headed now, with high-end
GPUs becoming rarer than hen's teeth-- it really would have been nice
to have a third option.

Intel hasn't totally discounted more discrete ARC cards in the future,
but all evidence seems to indicate that we've seen the last of them
for the time being.



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