Intel's upcoming Arc graphics cards have some important overclocking news.

 

Intel unveiled its new Intel Arc brand for discrete enthusiast graphics, as well as its new XeSS upscaling engine and the code names for its next four gaming graphics card generations, last week. Roger Chandler, vice president and general manager of Intel's Client Graphics Products, announced that Arc drivers will include a built-in overclocking utility in a blog post summarising the week.

Currently, AMD's Radeon Software has an overclocking tool, but Nvidia's does not. There are other GPU overclocking tools available, many of which are superior to the one included with Radeon Software. Even so, having access to sliders that allow you to quickly dial in an overclock can boost your GPU performance.

Despite the fact that Intel confirmed that Arc drivers will include an overclocking feature, the blog article didn't go into much detail. According to the post's only comments on the subject, "We're even adding overclocking controls into the driver UI to offer enthusiasts the tools they need to push the hardware to the maximum."

Presets that are optimised for the specific card installed in the system, as well as manual controls for enthusiasts who want to dial in their own overclock, would be ideal. It would also be helpful if there was a built-in benchmark or stress test, so you could quickly check your overclocking settings without having to launch another programme.

Hopefully, we'll learn more about the utility in the near future. Intel also mentioned that it has been working with Microsoft on DirectX 12 Ultimate, which now includes ray tracing, variable rate shading, and mesh shading support for Intel Arc cards. Because drivers are almost as vital as the hardware itself, they'll be crucial to the success of Intel Arc cards.

Early in 2022, the first generation of Intel Arc cards, code-named Alchemist, will be available. The Xe-HPG architecture, which incorporates dedicated ray tracing cores and Xe Matrix Execution (XMX) units, is used in these cards. The XMX units speed up machine learning, allowing Intel Arc cards to take use of features like AI-assisted XeSS up-scaling.

Despite the fact that Intel hasn't disclosed any specs or even hinted at performance, a teaser video showed Metro Exodus, Days Gone, and Crysis Remastered running on preproduction chips. The cards appear to be capable of running recent AAA games at the very least, but we'll have to wait and see how successfully they do so.