Intel Arc, other than launch close: driver problems move the output?

A few days ago there were those who claimed to know, albeit broadly, the release date of the first Intel Arc desktop video cards, codenamed “Alchemist”. Intel has generically indicated the second quarter, which means that at least one video card is expected to debut by June 30th. Those rumors were going in that direction, but according to what was reported by Igor’s Lab in the last few hours, there is the there is a real risk that the launch will be postponed “towards the end of the summer”.

To tell the truth, the German site is not very specific, it speaks of a release period between 1 July and 31 August. “Since the final hardware, firmware and clock rates are unlikely to change, the cause must be found in the software, ie in the drivers“, writes Igor Wallossek.

Intel would be having serious problems optimizing the drivers and achieving the originally expected performance, so much so that even the testers would not have a realistic picture of the performance of the new GPUs. Making these rumors more concrete is the fact that Intel had promised the arrival of a new driver for the first mobile solutions by the end of April which has not yet been seen.

According to Igor’s Lab, at home NVIDIA and AMD would have understood Intel’s difficulties and for this reason the first would have decided to cancel the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti with 16 GB of memory and the second to introduce a Radeon RX 6750 XT which should not represent a great leap forward compared to the 6700 XT.

In recent weeks we have seen the “rumors” paint downward performance with regard to the top of the range of the Alchemist series: it has gone from performance similar to the GeForce RTX 3070/3070 Ti to something closer to the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti.

Finally, the site reports that the debut of Intel GPUs could be marked by the absence of major partners and other issues in the relationship with resellers, from prices to RMA management. In short, at the moment the world of indiscretions paints a contradictory picture, and it is difficult to establish what the actual state of things is.

Tomorrow the Intel Vision conference will start and Computex will be held in the last part of May: it is possible that the US company will come out by clarifying the desktop roadmap once and for all.