If you’ve followed my coverage over the years, you know I’m usually the first person to tell you to be wary of Intel Arc GPUs. While I’ve always appreciated how "Team Blue" tried to break up Nvidia and AMD’s grip on the GPU market, the driver issues and inconsistent performance of the first wave of Intel Arc GPUs (the Alchemist era) made it a hard sell for anyone who just wanted their games to work.
But the world has changed. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know we’re in the middle of a full-blown RAM price crisis that has sent the cost of VRAM-heavy cards into the stratosphere. While Nvidia is (unofficially) hiking prices and even allegedly discontinuing some mid-range cards, Intel is doing the unthinkable: they’re actually making their budget card better.
