Intel ARC Alchemist currently on GeForce RTX 3060-like level with horrible drivers?

Within a couple of months, Intel will release its ARC Alchemist gaming GPUs. It's the third time Intel is trying its hand at discrete graphics and it seems the chip giant may finally succeed this time. But there are still a couple of major questions about the first-generation ARC GPUs. First up, will Intel be able to get the drivers right? Software is a critical part of a video card as is even the best-performing video card is worthless if it crashes continuously.

Driver quality is said to be horrible right now

The second big question is what kind of performance Intel will be able to deliver. Citing a new video from YouTuber Moore's Law is Dead, TweakTown reports Intel's best ARC Alchemist GPUs are not in great shape right now. Performance is said to be about on-par with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 and Intel will do its best to get it up to a RTX 3070 or even RTX 3070 Ti.

But the drivers are the worrying thing about this news. According to Moore's Law is Dead, the ARC Alchemist drivers are horrible. Intel still has some time to fix things, but the current situation is said to be worse than what AMD faced with its Vega drivers half a year before launch:

Tom over at Moore's Law is Dead has said that the Intel ARC Alchemist and its Xe GPU drivers are in a "horrible state" and that it will see the gaming-focused Alchemist GPU competing with the GeForce RTX 3060. In his new video, Tom explains it's: "hard to say what the final performance will be yet, as the drivers are in a horrible state. I mean worse than Vega a half a year before it came out state, and it's half a year before Xe launches".

He added: "So, what we can say though is this: anyone doubting that Intel Xe was going to at least compete with a 3060, it will at least compete with that now -- will it get up to a 3070, or 3070 Ti, we'll just have to wait for more information to come in".

On a related note, Moore's Law is Dead also confirms an earlier rumor about AMD releasing 6nm shrinks of its Navi 23 and Navi 22 GPUs.