Intel confirms ARC gaming GPUs support DX12 Ultimate, ray tracing

Intel's new ARC series gaming GPUs will support overclocking out of the box, with OC tools built into the Intel UI -- thanks to newly-released details on Intel's upcoming gaming GPUs.

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Not only that, but Intel is fully supporting the latest DirectX 12 Ultimate API which means we will see hardware-accelerated ray tracing through DXR (DirectX Ray Tracing), as well as support for Variable Rate Shading (VRS) and Mesh Shading. The Vulkan API will also receive ray tracing support from Intel's new ARC series GPUs.

Roger Chandler, Intel's VP and GM of Client Products explained: "While Xᵉ cores provide compute capacity, render slices combine them with the fixed function rendering units required to produce 3D graphics. Each render slice pairs four Xᵉ cores with four ray tracing units that fully support DirectX Raytracing and Vulkan Ray Tracing standards. Render slices also add samplers, pixel backends, and geometry and rasterization pipelines that are all designed for DirectX 12 Ultimate".

• Read more: Intel better details Xe-HPG gaming GPU: the ARC Alchemist on TSMC 6nm
• Read more: Intel's next-gen Alder Lake architecture: everything you need to know
• Read more: DirectX 12 Ultimate announced: the gold standard for next-gen games

Chandler continued, adding: "For the past three years, we've also been working closely with Microsoft to co-engineer DirectX 12 Ultimate. In addition to supporting ray tracing effects via DXR, Intel ARC graphics products will be capable of boosting performance with variable rate shading tier 2 and unlocking greater geometry details with mesh shading".