While Intel is playing catch up with the likes of AMD and ARM for its CPUs, the tech giant is setting its eyes towards becoming competitive in the GPU space. Beyond its Iris Xe integrated graphics, Intel announced Arc, which is set to be a line of high-performance graphics hardware, software, and services.

“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,” Intel vice president and general manager of Client Graphics Products and Solutions Roger Chandler said.

Intel Arc is set to unveil its line of GPUs by first quarter of 2022 for desktops and laptops, with Alchemist being the codename of its first batch of hardware. This is set to be followed by Battlemage, Celestial and Druid.

Some key features of Alchemist include support for hardware-based ray tracing, mesh shading, variable rate shading and Direct12 X Ultimate. In addition to that, Intel is set to have their own version of NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling upscaling tech in boosting game resolution while not putting too much strain on the GPU.

Intel Arc, specifically Alchemist, is based on the Xe-HPG microarchitecture. Overall, Alchemist is set to deliver higher performance over Intel’s DG1 discrete GPU. There is not much known about Alchemist for now, but rumors point to it being manufactured using TSMC’s node and is said to contain 512 execution units.