In a lengthy interview with Digital Foundry, Intel Fellow and ARC Graphics figurehead Tom "TAP" Petersen confirmed his company's focus: delivering frames via modern GPUs and CPUs at the smoothest cadence possible. And as far as he's concerned, that's a higher priority than highest-end graphics.

Petersen's perspective comes in part from his acknowledgement that Intel's product priority, as per the current sales marketplace, is integrated graphics - with mobile-targeted processors from the newly announced Intel Panther Lake line delivering what he estimates is "RTX 4050 mobile"-equivalent graphics performance.

When pressed about whether Intel's discrete line of Arc graphics products, including its newly announced, ultrabook-targeted B390 integrated graphics chip, would be up to the task of handling intensive workloads like path tracing, Petersen emphasised Intel's smoothness priority.

"Looking at [Arc's] architecture, we're okay for doing path tracing," Petersen says in a CES interview with Digital Foundry. "It's a question of what is the most important thing for us to do now, with our limited resources. Path tracing is still generally a 'big' GPU problem, right? It's not something that you do with smaller GPUs - certainly not integrated - so because of where we are positioned from a performance segment in the market, I don't think path tracing is our primary focus."

When asked about his vision of the future of real-time graphics rendering, Petersen describes an industry-wide "nirvana" of photo-realistic imagery, which includes everything from "painted-on" effects like ambient occlusion to "physically light-based evaluation," only to pivot.

"I don't think that's the primary thing that's breaking immersion right now," Petersen says. "It's this whole stutter thing."

He proceeds to describe initiatives like Google's "Project Butter" for Android 4.1, which attempted to resolve v-sync issues for phone scrolling on common 60Hz smartphone panels. "It looks like paper, right? That's what I would love to do first for gaming - how do you make it so that your gaming experience doesn't have any of the problems that you get by translating artists' intent into an image?"

Petersen reminds us of the October announcement of Intel Precompiled Shader Distribution, which will download shaders to your PC by way of the Arc Control software suite. This will debut as part of Intel's Panther Lake review driver downloads before rolling out for public use, and shader downloads will only be available for a limited selection of DirectX 12 games on Steam at launch.

Intel pledges to update its offline shaders every time a supported game receives a patch from developers or Intel updates its drivers, and Petersen says these are "gameplay-based PSOs" - meaning, the Arc team is actively playing through affected games. It remains unclear how this process may limit the number of supported games or whether Intel is applying techniques like agentic AI to "play" through affected games for PSO accumulation.

When asked about Microsoft's efforts to deliver precompiled shaders for Windows gaming, Petersen confirms Intel's interest in "very much supporting" that Microsoft effort, then adds: "I think eventually Microsoft is going to have a solution here that scales larger. But it's just a question of, what's the timeline on that? For us, we're doing this to improve the experience now, because it's a problem for our gamers."

While Intel Arc currently employs machine learning processes for its XeSS image upscaler and Xe Frame Generation system, Petersen hints to an even bigger AI-powered emphasis coming to the aforementioned issue of frame-pacing - and by proxy, the player's sensation of input response.

"We haven't really applied AI to the fundamental problem of smoothness: the mismatch between the position of things and the time that you see them," Petersen says. "If you could correct the position or correct the time, that would be better, probably, right? If you could have something that was correcting the timing, even though the position was wrong, that might be good. This could be the next generation of frame-pacing."

Petersen suggests that Intel has techniques in mind to reduce some seeming spikes in input latency while AI-powered image reconstruction and frame generation systems are in play - such as predicting players' viewport movements, so that rapid mouse movements of a camera don't take as long to appear on screen. And with Panther Lake's emphasis on integrated graphics, Petersen suggests "more multi-threading of graphical processes" as a next-generation way for Intel to get more out of integrated and discrete GPUs running a PC at the same time. "Maybe you have two different renderers running in parallel on the same engine, perhaps," he says.

And Petersen acknowledges users' confusion and criticisms about frame generation as a technology by emphasising Intel's delineation between FG and rasterisation as an important line to draw in the sand.

"Some people were trying to make [frame generation] sound like it was performance, right?" Petersen says. "I think the pushback from the community is saying, 'We don't think of it like performance.' So, let's separate it into its own space, and say what's happening is a visual improvement effort. It's different from the horsepower of your car, right? The horsepower has its own spec. So we're trying to do our part by saying, these are very clearly different, and we like to think of them as different things. That's what animation error is all about - actually trying to help separate FPS from smoothness."

From a holistic standpoint, Intel's strategy dovetails seamlessly with the gaming critiques produced by Digital Foundry and others. The quality of the gaming experience - of performance itself, one might say - isn't really defined by frames per second. Perhaps what is more important is how the player perceives the experience.

"I think that's a great way to think about it," says Petersen. "We're still in that, 'hey, let's get higher performance.' And everybody thinks of performance as FPS, and I'm hoping that at some point we transition to, how can we generate the best experience? And that's not FPS, it's... something."