Next-gen Intel Arc GPUs could take on Nvidia RTX 50-series with this big upgrade (2025)

Nvidia is the big name in graphics cards right now, but Intel could bring some serious competition in 2026 if a new report about the company's upcoming Celestial GPUs proves true.

Earlier this month user Haze2k1 posted a screenshot to X of what appears to be an Intel job listing for an engineer position focused on memory tuning for discrete graphics hardware.

The exciting part? That job calls for GDDR6/GDDR7 RAM work on Intel Arc products.

The job listing has since been taken down, but I found a similar listing (via the Wayback Machine) for an engineer who would "drive and deliver pre- and post-silicon validation and characterization of GDDR6/7 on Intel's ARC products."

This is a big deal because right now the only way to get a PC graphics card with the latest GDDR7 RAM is to buy one of Nvidia's new RTX 50-series cards, and they're remarkably expensive and hard to find right now.

But at some point we're going to see AMD and Intel bring their own next-gen graphics cards to market to compete with Nvidia, and these job listings suggest Intel will have GDDR7 RAM in at least some of its upcoming GPUs.

That's important because GDDR7 RAM is faster and more capable than GDDR6, enabling better performance in games, creation apps and AI applications.

And while Nvidia seems content to dominate the expensive end of the GPU market for the foreseeable future by selling its cards as the best for 4K gaming, Intel has carved out a small but meaningful niche for itself selling affordable GPUs that are good for gaming at less demanding 1080p and 1440p resolutions.

In fact, a few months ago our own Jason England built himself a pretty sweet 1440p sim racing rig using just a $250 Intel Battlemage card, and the Intel Arc B580 GPU proves you can get great PC gaming without breaking the bank.

Bottom line

So if Intel's upcoming C-series GPUs (aka the Celestial line) can compete favorably with Nvidia's cheaper 50-series cards—the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, for example—that's great news for budget-minded PC gaming enthusiasts.

But we'll likely be waiting until 2026 to find out, because Intel's C-series Arc GPUs are still quite a ways away. In the meantime, I've played games on Nvidia's 50-series GPUs and it's probably the best way to game on PC for the foreseeable future — it's just too bad it costs an arm and a leg.

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