No, you won’t need a Core 10th Gen CPU or newer for Intel Arc graphics cards

rockpapershotgun.com:

Last week Intel published a “quick start guide” for their upcoming Arc A-series graphics cards, including a “Supported Hardware Configurations” section that only specifically namechecked their own 10th, 11th and 12th Gen Core CPUs. Cue a heady mix of confusion and perturbation – surely Intel weren’t suggesting that Arc GPUs would only function when paired with an Intel CPU, and a relatively new one at that?

No, they weren’t, though the guide’s vague wording isn’t doing it – and worse, potential Arc users – any favours. Parts of the guide appear to conflate support for Resizable BAR with support for the Arc A-series in general, which further muddies things as Resizable BAR works on AMD Ryzen chips as well as those three Core CPU generations. I asked Intel directly for clarification and essentially, Arc GPUs won’t have such super specific CPU requirements just to run - though they’ll apparently perform better in systems that do support Resizable BAR.

Resizable BAR is Intel’s name for a feature that aims to improve PC performance by making the entirety of your graphics card’s frame buffer accessible to the CPU at once, as opposed to the usual tiny chunks. The Arc guide’s contentious Supported Hardware Configurations section explains that “Resizable BAR must be enabled for optimal performance in all applications using Intel Arc A-Series Graphics,” but then immediately lists only the 10th, 11th and 12th Core generations as supported chips.

While Resizable BAR specifically won’t work on Intel 9th-gen chips and older, it’s easy to read this as suggesting the newer chips are also the only confirmed compatible chips for Arc graphics in general. That would be strange, especially since on Nvidia GeForce GPUs, Resizable BAR