As detailed by members of Intel's graphics team, the Intel Arc brand will cover hardware, software and services, as well as span across multiple hardware generations, starting with the Xe HPG architecture DG2, codename Alchemist.

The Alchemist, which should be coming in the Q1 2022, and be based on Intel's Xe HPG microarchitecture, which Intel describes as a convergence of its Xe LP, HP, and HPC microarchitectures, promises "scalability and compute efficiency with advanced graphics features", including hardware-based ray tracing, artificial inteligence-driven super sampling, and full support for DirectX 12 Ultimate.

"Today marks a key moment in the graphics journey we started just a few years ago. The launch of the Intel Arc brand and the reveal of future hardware generations signifies Intel’s deep and continued commitment to gamers and creators everywhere. We have teams doing incredible work to ensure we deliver first-class and frictionless experiences when these products are available early next year", said Roger Chandler, Intel vice president and general manager of Client Graphics Products and Solutions.

In its brief video, Chandler also unveiled a few new codenames for future generations that will launch under the Intel Arc brand, including Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid.

Unfortunately, Intel was not keen in revealing any additional details but did show some of those graphics features running in games like Forza Horizon 4, PUBG, Rift Breaker, Crysis Remastered, Metro Exodus, and others, all running on Intel Arc Alchemist pre-production silicon.

On the other hand, Damien Triolet, ex. colleague hack from Hardware.fr, ex. AMD guy, and now one of the members of the Intel Graphics Product Team, did promise that we will hear more about these new discrete graphics solutions in the coming weeks and months so we are certainly looking forware to it.