One of the great hopes for the graphics card market is a bit surreal, and it is none other than Intel’s entry into it. But the fact is that the sector is at a rather peculiar point, with prices skyrocketing and, luckily, now with stock of models (very expensive as we can all see). That is why any news or detail goes deep into everyone’s hopes and based on this we have something really interesting to see, since Intel has shown an ARC Alchemist in a NUC Beast Canyon!
It has been again on Twitter and once again with the usual trend Raja Koduri, the father of architecture and chief designer and engineer, has shown something simple but interesting. Tomb Raider (looks like SOTTR specifically) being executed by one of its graphics cards in a device as compact as a NUC from the company itself.
NUC Best Canyon and ARC in Tomb Raider
Arc Beast Canyon Lara Croft XeSS pic.twitter.com/PesBjcW83S
— Raja Koduri (@Rajaontheedge) February 17, 2022
The normal thing in an image like this would be to see the graphics card in a normal consumer or pre-assembled PC, perhaps signed by Intel, but the fact is that the brand subliminally suggests a lot of things.
Koduri is brief in his statements, but he affirms that what we see in the image is precisely a NUC from the Best Canyon series with an ARC GPU (he does not specify which one for obvious reasons) running a Lara Croft title under XeSS.
To situate ourselves a bit, the team has an i9-11900KB with 8 Cores and 16 threads that can reach 4.9 GHz. There is also the option of an i7 where only the frequency changes (4.8 GHz). The first thing this tells us is that his successor, the NUC 12 Extreme Long-awaited Dragon Canyon (unveiled at this year’s CES) isn’t quite ready, and Intel is playing it safe.
What can we get clear with ARC?
As curious as it may seem, everything revolves around Best Canyon and not the GPU itself. The Intel team can house a very long graphics card and can be powered with an 8-pin cable or with two 6-pin cables, this option being only reserved for a very compact GPU and only two slots.
Therefore, taking this into account, what Raja Koduri shows seems to be a A350 or perhaps and in the best of cases a A380two entry-level GPUs that seem to be very suitable for titles as demanding as SOTTR.
As if that were not enough, it is confirmed that this title would have support for XeSS, so the arrival of Intel GPUs on the market could bring a list of games that will have the option of improving their performance thanks to this technology. A news that would be a Direct hit on NVIDIA and AMDwhich seen in perspective and with another approach could be partially confirmed if we take into account that the greens have been pushing DLSS support in more and more games for months.
Without a doubt, Intel will come stomping, let’s not also go into out-of-range perspectives based on “hype”, let’s wait for the first filtered results for it, although what is seen for now is promising.
