There are things that are made for begging, and in the case of Intel’s early gaming graphics cards, things have reached completely desperate levels. With the marketing tour of the last few weeks talking about the benefits of the Gordon Moore-founded company’s first attempt to compete with AMD and NVIDIA, all that’s left is to finally have them in your hands. Well, it seems that we are approaching the indicated date, since after much waiting we finally know what the range of ARC Alchemist Desk.
It’s surprising to say the least that while NVIDIA has a few weeks left to present its RTX 40 and AMD has already previewed its next generation from Intel, they finally decide to launch their ARC Alchemist. Which delayed their launch for several months, motivated in particular by some problems with the pilots which promised to be resolved for a long time. We can’t wait to see the final performance of these graphics cards in games, because we absolutely wouldn’t want to see the history of the i740 repeat itself.
These are the first Alchemist ARCs for the desktop
In total, it will be four graphics cards that Intel will launch to compete with its two rivals, of which the ones that generate the most interest for us are the ARC A750 and ARC A770, with performance similar to that of the NVIDIA RTX 3060 and RTX 3060Ti. . Both of these graphics cards have a 256-bit GDDR6 memory bus, but what disappointed us a bit was seeing an 8GB configuration at this point and more when there are 2GB GDDR6 chips available.
It would have cost Intel nothing to launch an ARC A750 with 16 GB of RAM on the market. Also, we also don’t understand the existence of an 8GB A770. And we say the same of the rest of the manufacturers, using 1GB GDDR6 memory chips seems to us to be a mistake, whoever it is either, and it’s one of the things you’ll want to look out for when buying a new graphics card.
Two different GPUs for an entire architecture
The range in total is based on two different chips, being the only one that uses the ACM-G11 of 7200 million transistors, the A380, which for performance is not a graphics card for games.
The other three models use the ACM-G10 chip, made up of three times as many transistors and in three different configurations.
- A580 with 24 cores and 3027 ALUs in FP32,
- A750 with 28 cores and 3584 ALUs in FP32
- A770 with 4096 ALU FP32 inside.
This is an architecture that fully supports DirectX 12 Ultimate, so it has its own RT cores for ray tracing, the so-called RTU or Ray Tracing unitswith whom too showed superior performance to the RTX 30 with ray tracing in games. And we can’t forget the XMX enginetensioner type units for the XeSS algorithm, the answer to NVIDIA’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR. Finally, we can’t help but have the best video codec of any graphics chip on the market. Will this be enough to arouse consumer interest?
