A convincing looking Intel slide has been unearthed, which appears to show the price/performance positioning of Intel's Arc Alchemist graphics card family. As per our headline, the slide suggests that Intel will have a consumer graphics card that is on a par with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 (and AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT). Intel's top enthusiast targeted add-in card will carry a similar MSRP to its rivals, of US$499 or less.
Above you can see that the top-end consumer Arc Alchemist (DG2) graphics card will consume up to 225W and is part of a subsection of the proposed lineup based on 'SOC1'. These cards will cover pricing / performance categories from $300 to $499, RTX 3060 to RTX 3070.
With their latest generation GPUs, Nvidia and AMD aren't really doing anything for entry-level gamers – leaving those with less cash pondering over secondhand previous gen performers for upgrades. The leaked slide gives hope to those who traditionally look at new tech graphics cards priced between $100 and $225. As for performance, with one of these 'SOC2' graphics cards from Intel, you will be looking at ($159) RTX 1650 performance at best, but you might be able to upgrade to this level without the need for a GPU power connector in your system (SOC1 is max 75W).
Intel Xe-HPG photos: are the above SOC2 (left) and SOC1?
VideoCardz reports that the leaked Intel slide appears to tally closely with a statement from a reliable Twitter-based tipster. We still have a number of months to wait for Arc Alchemist to appear. These X-HPG architecture TSMC N6 fabricated GPUs should be officially launched at CES 2022.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 12GB rumour
This isn't the first time that Nvidia has been said to be working on re-introducing the GeForce RTX 2060. It was said to be helping gamers with supplies of this previous gen card in early 2021, as consumer GPU shortages really started to bite. Did anyone see evidence of lots of boxed or bundled RTX 2060 cards becoming available after that? – I didn't.
Now rumours, via VideoCardz, point to a 12GB version of the RTX 2060 in the making, aiming for a January 2022 release. To me, this new SKU doesn’t make much sense, as I've read analysts talking about Nvidia regretting making the RTX 3060 12GB – due to the high prices of GDDR6. Higher-spec GDDR6X was cheaper, due to demand/supply, last time I read about this issue. However, commodity DRAM suppliers can sometimes bring online whole new factories to cope with high demand, and this kind of action could enable greater GDDR6 availability at better pricing in time for early next year. The 12nm facilities for making the GPUs might have ample capacity too.
