We’re likely still months away from seeing Intel’s lineup of discrete graphics cards officially appear on the market, but that hasn’t stopped people from speculating their possible performance and retail prices. However, one curious Reddit user might’ve just spotted the prices for their upcoming Intel Arc GPUs thanks to Intel themselves.
Intel had launched a ‘Xe HPG Scavenger Hunt’ website back in March of this year, as part of their marketing for their graphics division. As its name suggests, it’s a scavenger hunt of sorts where there’ll be 10 clues handed out by Intel and their partners, and participants will need to put it all together and submit an answer to stand a chance of winning their prizes. According to their terms and conditions, they’ll start releasing the clues from the end of October till the end of January next year.
As part of the prize pool, Intel will send out one of their ‘premium’ Intel Arc graphics cards, some Intel Arc merch and a six month subscription for Xbox Game Pass for PC to 100 grand prize winners, with a stated total approximate retail value of USD900. Doing some quick math, six months of Xbox Game Pass for PC will be USD60, while the included merch could be anywhere from USD40 to USD60 at most, with the Intel Store listing an Intel Arc Jersey for USD53.65. This means that Intel’s top of the line Arc graphics card could be priced around the USD800 mark.
Similarly, Intel will also be giving away the more ‘performance’ oriented Intel Arc graphics cards, Intel Arc merch and a three month subscription for Xbox Game Pass for PC to 200 1st place prize winners with a stated total retail value of USD700. Taking away the cost of the merch and Xbox Game Pass subscription, their performance graphics cards could be priced at around USD630. Unfortunately, if you were planning to join the Xe HPG Scavenger Hunt yourself, you’ll be disappointed to know that it’s not open to Malaysians at the moment.
Nevertheless, it’s intriguing to see Intel perhaps unwittingly hinting at their retail pricing of their upcoming graphics cards. While these numbers do seem a little pricey right now, it should be pointed out that it’s still speculation for now, with no official word from Intel. Performance of their graphics cards also remain to be seen, though based on early leaks is expected to be between the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 for the highest tier premium GPU. According to Intel themselves, their Arc graphics cards ought to debut sometime in Q1 of 2022.
If you can’t to get your hands on Intel’s graphics cards when they launch, you can check out more of what we know about them in the meantime such as Intel XeSS, Team Blue’s open source answer to NVIDIA’s own DLSS technology.
