AT AN INVESTOR meeting in February, Intel promised to ship four million Arc graphics cards this year. We’re still waiting. The only Intel card currently available is the low-end A380 ($139). It proved a disappointment (see page 74 for the review). The midrange A750 and A770 are due to launch by the time you read this. The first samples are being inspected, and the A770 is expected to perform somewhere between a GeForce RTX 3060 and 3060Ti, and a bit faster than the Radeon RT 6600XT.
What went wrong with Intel’s muchanticipated entry into the graphics card market? Intel’s Tom Petersen (a graphics guru poached from Nvidia) cited ‘readiness’ as the reason for the delays. There were issues with supply lines, but the big problem is software-related. The lack of decent DX11 support disappointed reviewers of the A380. Intel says it’s ‘looking ahead’ by concentrating on DX12, a justification that pleased nobody.