Arc Alchemist: Intel’s graphics cards also support Vulkan 1.3

Fortunately, the lack of support for a new graphics API has rarely been a reason to buy a new graphics card in recent years. The current standard APIs DirectX 12 and Vulkan are basically supported by all graphics cards since AMD’s GCN or Nvidia’s Kepler generation. Nevertheless, said APIs are constantly evolving, and some newer (sub) versions can only be used with significantly newer GPUs.

Vulkan 1.3 with Intel’s Arc Alchemist

This applies, for example, to DirectX 12 Ultimate, which includes ray tracing, among other things. And there are also further developments at Vulkan: The latest version, Vulkan 1.3. was presented at the end of January and brought with it, among other things, a modified rendering pipeline. Nvidia supports the new API version on the same day, and a corresponding driver update came from AMD a week later. Intel is now apparently following suit: According to the Khronos Group, which develops Vulkan, Intel’s new Arc graphics cards are fully compatible with Vulkan 1.3.

An entry recently appeared on the Khronos website that confirms exactly this compatibility: According to this, Vulkan 1.3 runs on the Arc graphics cards A350M, A370M, A550, A730M and A770M – i.e. on Intel’s entire notebook lineup. There is no talk of the corresponding desktop graphics cards, but they have not yet been officially presented.

Also exciting: Intel Arc: A730M GPU on mobile RTX 3070 level benchmarked and new laptop releases

Since Intel’s Arc graphics cards are based on the same architecture in both notebooks and desktops – Intel’s Xe-HPG – there shouldn’t be any differences in API support. Therefore, once the company unveils the new Arc desktop graphics cards, they are expected to support the same APIs as competing products from AMD and Nvidia. Anything else would be surprising, however, because as a newcomer, Intel could hardly afford to make a blunder in API support.

Source: Khronos Group via tech powerup