In brief: Intel's scavenger hunt competition that offered Arc Alchemist desktop graphics cards as prizes (when they arrive) has finished, with the 200 winners now being notified. Interestingly, this has given us an idea of what the GPUs will cost when they land.

Intel launched its Xe HPG (the name Arc was going by back then) Scavenger Hunt on March 26 to gain more publicity and interest for its Alchemist graphics cards. It began with a video posted on Twitter containing some hidden codes that pointed to an Intel website and went from there.

The hunt has now finished. Rock Paper Shotgun reports that Intel sent out confirmation messages to the 200 winners informing them of their prizes and the bundle's approximate retail value (ARV), which means we can work out roughly how much Intel's desktop cards will cost at launch.

Twitter user La Frite David posted a screenshot of his message confirming a bundle with an ARV of $700. It contains a "performance" Intel Arc graphics card, merchandise, and three months of Xbox Game Pass for PC. Taking off the $45 it costs for three months of Ultimate-tier Game Pass leaves $655. Exactly how much the merchandise is worth is unclear, but we can expect the final price of the card to be somewhere between $600 and $640.

Another winner, @Malcore, also posted a shot of their win. The card in this case is listed as a "Premium" Arc GPU, and it ships with merchandise and six months of Game Pass for PC Ultimate. The bundle ARV is $900, meaning the card will likely be around $750 to $800.

That's quite a high figure for the Premium-tier Arc card. A quick look on Newegg shows the cheapest RTX 3080 is $869. That's not far off Intel's product, and few expect the two to offer similar levels of performance---the Arc is likely to be closer to the RTX 3070 or 3070 Ti. There are also the upcoming Nvidia RTX 4000-series (Lovelace) and AMD RDNA 3 cards to consider. But GPU prices are falling, so the final Arc pricing could be a surprise; time will tell whether it's a good or bad one.