At its Investor Meeting 2022, Intel revealed some very interesting details about its upcoming Arc discrete GPU lineup. The company assured that Arc is indeed landing in Q1 but first inside notebooks and then hitting desktops in the next quarter.
Perhaps to the disappointment of some, Team Blue made it abundantly clear that the first-gen Arc "Alchemist" and second-gen Arc "Battlemage" GPUs won"t be taking on the top dogs from rivals AMD and Nvidia. Such "ultra-enthusiast" levels of performance are in the works with third-gen Celestial GPUs. However, that doesn"t necessarily mean that the flagship Alchemist GPU packing 512 Xe HPG Execution Units or 32 Xe-cores, dubbed the SKU1, is going to be a slouch.
A Geekbench score leak today suggests the Arc 512EU part is pretty competent, at least in this kind of workload as the GPU has scored 85,448 points in Geekbench 5"s OpenCL benchmark test. This is about in the vicinity of the GeForce RTX 2070 / 2060 SUPER. For a comparison with AMD Radeon GPUs, the score is slightly higher than the Radeon RX 6600 XT.
It must be noted here that OpenCL compute score is not always indicative of gaming performance, however, it does provide a rough estimate of a GPU"s might. Also apparently the Arc GPU is tested here with a Core i5-9600K running 2666MT/s memory. While the Geekbench OpenCL test is mainly GPU intense, the Arc 512EU SKU1 might score a bit higher with a more powerful system.