Intel’s Arc Alchemist GPU seemingly matches RTX 3070 Ti in benchmarks

Intel’s upcoming Arc Alchemist graphics cards are seemingly on par with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. This is interesting news in itself since Nvidia’s high-end graphics card certainly packs a punch. The information comes from the Twitter account @TUM_APISAK, which linked this SiSoftware page where the benchmarks for the Intel Arc Alchemist card have allegedly been revealed.

The card seemingly boasts some powerful specs. But, as always with news like this, take it with a healthy dose of salt. If this information does turn out to be true though, it could be an intriguing alternative to Nvidia’s own rather expensive and hard to find graphics card. Intel seems to have even more planned in the future too after information spotted from an upcoming Linux Mesa driver update was found.

Intel’s intriguing alternative

There’s quite a bit of information to glean from the posting, while there’s also a fair bit we still don’t know. The first few things to make note of are fairly simple characteristics of the Intel Arc Alchemist card. Prior rumors suggest it should come with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, though today’s listing states that it has 12.8GB. This is likely just a discrepancy between memory in use during testing and total memory. The card also seems to have 4,096 stream processors, along with 4MB of L2 cache.

It also seems to operate at 2.1 GHz, which would put it over the RTX 3070 Ti’s own 1.77GHz. Considering that AMD’s 6500 XT operates on the same TSMC 6nm node as the upcoming Intel chips, it’s reasonable to expect the larger Intel GPU will manage to hit that frequency at least.

(Image credit: Intel)

What’s even more interesting is the driver that was used in the benchmark. It’s noted as an “Intel Graphics d gfx-driver-ci-master-10002 DCH ReleaseInternal” driver. This indicates that these results were derived from internal testing. Depending on your point of view, this could either lend a little more credibility to the results, or it could show that these numbers aren’t indicative of the final product.

Much of this information will need to be taken with skepticism until some kind of confirmation from Intel. However, the things that we can glean from it so far are intriguing and in line with earlier performance projections. Particularly when it comes to the card seemingly being able to outperform the RTX 3070 Ti. It would be nice to have a competitor to the high-end graphics from Nvidia and AMD. Rising prices and manufacturing problems could cause issues across the board though. Still, it’ll be interesting to see what official benchmarks, price points, and availability look like for the Intel Arc Alchemist graphics cards. More information is expected to arrive by the end of March.