Intel Xe-HPG DG2 Arc Alchemist with 448 EUs referenced in recent Mesa commit, could potentially take on AMD Radeon RX 6600 or Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti

Intel will be launching its Arc family of GPUs in early 2022. We have so far known that Arc Alchemist will be likely available in two TDP variants — a 175 W - 225 W and a 75 W SKU. Though known for some time, we are now quite sure that there will be a 448-execution unit (EU) offering alongside the 512 and 128 EU variants as well. 

This confirmation comes via a recent draft Mesa commit detailing "pixel pipeline optimizations for XeHP hardware". For those not in the know, Mesa is an opensource 3D graphics library that features APIs such as Vulkan and OpenGL. The patch notes that DG2-448 "gives us a 20%-40% performance improvement on most interesting workloads". The indicated workloads include Dota 2 (OpenGL), Shadow of Mordor (Vulkan), CS:GO (OpenGL), Team Fortress 2 (OpenGL), GFXBench (OpenGL), and Unigine Valley (OpenGL) among others.

It is not immediately clear as to what this DG2-448 is being compared to, but the percentages surely seem to indicate substantial improvements in "non-trivial workloads".

The first reference to DG2-448 was spotted back in June when known leaker @TUM_APISAK leaked the boost clock of this GPU to be 1.8 GHz and that it stands to rival an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT or an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070.

That being said, the Arc Alchemist lineup is still somewhat mysterious. While leaks so far have indicated a range of SKUs including 512, 448, 384, 256, 192, and 128 EUs, we only know for sure that the 512-EU and 128-EU variants are in the offing.

Previously, we saw information that indicated that the 512-EU variant could potentially challenge the Radeon RX 6800 and an RTX 3070, but a recent slide leak indicated that Intel would probably settle for taking on the RX 6700 XT with the top-tier Arc Alchemist DG2 SKU. That means, the 448-EU variant, if true could be aiming for RTX 3060 Ti or Radeon RX 6600 XT levels of performance. 

However, this is just speculation for now. Things should become more clearer as we start seeing the first Xe-HPG benchmarks in the run up to launch.

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