Enthusiasts might remember back in the day when NVIDIA and AMD promoted their graphics cards with virtual girls such as Ruby, ATI’s red-haired ninja, and Dawn, a forest fairy born out of various GeForce tech demos. Intel seems to be bringing that marketing idea back for its upcoming Arc graphics cards.
HotHardware has shared exclusive images and wallpapers of the Alchemist, a female mascot that will complement Intel’s first generation of Arc graphics cards bearing the same code name. Traditionally found in RPGs, the Alchemist is a character class that excels in magic and the crafting of items such as potions and elixirs.
Intel’s Alchemist character will be joined in the future by additional mascots called the Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid. Lining up with Alchemist, these are the code names that Intel has chosen for its future generations of Arc graphics cards.
Intel’s first Arc graphics cards are based on the Xe HPG microarchitecture, a convergence of the comany’s Xe LP, HP, and HPC microarchitectures. Alchemist products will arrive in the first quarter of 2022.
The Alchemist family of graphics cards have been rumored to be powerful right out of the gate with overclocking support in tow, challenging upper-tier cards like NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 XT. We’ll find out sometime in early 2022 if that’s the case and if these cards live up to the Alchemist moniker.
Source: HotHardware