Which got us thinking about the current status quo. One thing we've noticed over the years has been the steadily bloating size of GPU driver downloads. That's a bit interesting, because there's a huge gulf in performance between many of those integrated solutions and the dedicated Arc GPUs. And Intel does support 11th Gen Tiger Lake, 12th Gen Alder Lake, and 13th Gen Raptor Lake integrated graphics with its drivers. Intel in contrast is at an advantage, since it doesn't have a huge back catalog of GPUs to support. well, AMD's a bit of a special case right now, as one set of drivers only supports the latest RDNA 3 GPUs while the other set supports RDNA 2, RDNA, Vega, and Polaris, but we're told the two will get a unified driver in the future. Then you have potentially multiple generations of hardware - Nvidia's latest drivers support five different architectures while AMD's drivers support. Beyond the hardware, though, software and drivers play a critical role in extracting maximum performance from the GPU, and drivers are becoming increasingly complex.Ĭonsider all the APIs that need to be supported: DirectX 9/10/11/12, OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, and others besides.

The Intel Arc Alchemist architecture also came out last year, but you can certainly make the argument that it was really designed to compete with Nvidia Ampere and AMD RDNA 2. The two incumbents recently released their next-generation GPU architectures, with Nvidia Ada Lovelace taking on AMD RDNA 3.

We now have three major players vying to be the best graphics cards: AMD, Nvidia, and Intel.

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