The Vulkan 1.3 API is now supported by Intel Arc Alchemist notebooks, mentioning the A770M, A730M, A550M, A370M, and A350M models. All these variants are still to be seen, but Xe-HPG gets Vulkan support.
Khronos, the developer of Vulkan, has announced the 1.3 specifications for the API after it has been in the dry dock for almost 2 years. NVIDIA released 1.3 almost a week later, adding support from RTX 3000 to GTX 900. AMD did the same for RDNA and RDNA 2, giving Intel support for Iris Xe and Arch Alchemist.
Intel Arc Alchemist and Vulkan: A350M to A770M
In case there was any doubt, we will have up to 5 Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs in notebooks: A350M, A370M, A550M, A730M and A770M. All of them have received Vulkan 1.3 support, and the bad news is that there are no desktop GPUs – does that mean they will be a long time coming?
Everything indicates that these 5 portable graphics cards are still an unknown quantity, as they have just arrived in Europe. It goes without saying that the A770M and A550M won’t take long to hit the market as gaming laptops with the hopes of many under their arms.
As you know, Intel has prioritized the Chinese market instead of launching them globally. This decision is understandable, but the reason might also have to do with the low inventory of laptops with these GPUs. So far, the performance has been rather disappointing, especially compared to the rivals from AMD and NVIDIA.
AMD has improved, but still has a long way to go to catch up with NVIDIA in notebooks. However, we will keep a close eye on these GPUs as they are still ports of the Arc Alchemist desktop graphics cards.