There's a tonne of speculation about just how good Intel's upcoming desktop graphics cards will be: can they compete with Nvidia's top cards? Will they be affordable enough to make an impact at the bottom end? Will they actually be available in enough numbers that people can actually buy them at a reasonable price?
While the jury's still out on most of those, the one thing we are starting to get an idea of is their potential performance. Some leaked information about Intel's XE-HPG card with 512 Execution Units suggests it'll hit a 2.1GHz clock speed, and will have as much as 12.8GB of memory. That seems a little specific and unlikely, but if these specs turn out to be true, it could be as fast as Nvidia's RTX 3070 Ti.
It might even be a little faster. As Videocardz highlights, some leaked results from a SiSoftware report on the GPU's General Purpoise Processing score showed the Intel card performing almost 8% faster than the 3070 Ti, which starts to nudge it towards 3080 territory.
If this turns out to be true, Intel's entry into the GPU market is going to be exceedingly exciting. It'll bring a new batch of hot and heavy competition to the high-end GPUs, which are so desperately in short supply and overpriced. That added competition could see GPU prices made much more reasonable, and with a new batch of stock, it may be that we'll see availability improve in turn.
Look out for the first Intel Arc desktop GPUs in the second half of this year.
Image source: Moore's Law is Dead/Youtube