Intel’s first enthusiast graphics cards are here — and on the eve of AMD and Nvidia’s transition to a new generation, Team Blue is actually doing well. The $289 Arc A750 and $329/$349 Arc A770 offer surprisingly strong 1080p performance, a unique mix of features, and aggressive pricing that make them well worth considering for midrange PCs — for most For gamers.
However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s a lot to cover here, and time is short, so let’s take a quick look at the hardware, cover the software features we’re most interested in, and then get to the heart of this review: gaming benchmarks.
We’re launching a brand new GPU test suite in late 2022, with a whole new batch of newcomers joining a mix of Digital Foundry favorites covering every major engine. It’s a forward-looking test suite whose title uses modern APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan, which should give Intel a chance to show its strengths. Of course, we’ll also be looking at some classic “banana peel” DX11 game performance in our video review, and we expect Intel’s first-gen Arc GPUs to have more difficulty.
First: hardware. We tested two Intel limited-edition models (think Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards), the $289 Arc A750 and the $349 Arc A770 16GB. The design language here is more straightforward than Nvidia and AMD’s reference designs, with a metal chassis, black plastic shroud, rounded corners, and two axial fans. The difference on the A770 16GB LE is the LED lighting in three areas (along the top of the card, around the fan, and on the back), while the A750 LE does not, but both cards occupy the same size (27x10x4cm) and require the same eight-pin plus six-pin power input , is actually based on the same Alchemist G10 chip. In terms of ports, we have one HDMI 2.1 port and three 40Gbps DisplayPort 2.0 ports on both dual-slot cards. It’s worth noting that both also include support for AV1 encoding, which is not part of Nvidia’s 30-series or AMD’s 6000-series graphics cards, which should help with the same resolution compared to H.264/H.265 rate to stream or record with better quality.
Models from other manufacturers, including GPU newcomers like Acer*, is reportedly coming soon at a range of price points and designs. Most notably, the 8GB version of the A770 retails for $329. Here’s how the three models compare in terms of core specs — against the backdrop of the $129 Arc A380 that debuted in China earlier this year.
| Intel GPU | Arc A770 16GB | Arc A770 8GB | Arc A750 8GB | Arc A380 6GB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Xenon Color | 32 | 32 | 28 | 8 | |
| graphic clock | 2100MHz | 2100MHz | 2050MHz | 2000MHz | |
| pending | 225W | 225W | 225W | 75W | |
| memory size | 16GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 | 6GB GDDR6 | |
| memory interface | 256 bits | 256 bits | 256 bits | 96 bit | |
| memory bandwidth | 560GB/sec | 512GB/sec | 512GB/sec | 186GB/sec | |
| price | $349 | $329 | $289 | $139 |
Judging by the raw specs, the A750 and A770 should be strong replacements for the RTX 3060, with advantages in most areas – including silicon produced at TSMC’s 6nm node, the same as the recent PS5 update. Based on Nvidia’s Ampere architecture and produced on an older 8nm process, the RTX 3060 has a smaller die (276 mm² vs. 406 mm²), lower boost clocks (1777MHz vs. 2100MHz), less memory (12GB vs. 16GB DDR6) ), less memory bandwidth (360GB/s vs. 560GB/s), and consumes less power (170W vs. 225W). In a naive comparison, the A770 looks like the better graphics card – but Nvidia definitely has the experience advantage, honed by its architecture and drivers over generations, to Combat newbies in the discrete GPU world. So how do these cards compare in real-world testing?
To find out, we put together a sturdy test bench. The A770 and A750 arrived too early to use Intel’s 13th Gen parts – or AMD’s Ryzen 7000 processors – so we opted for something more mature, familiar and… usable. That means the Core i9 12900K 16-core processor, with its performance cores locked at 5.2GHz and efficiency cores at 3.9GHz, is kept cool by a powerful Noctua DH15 tower cooler. This top-of-the-line CPU features an Asus Z690 Maximus Hero motherboard, two 16GB G.Skill DDR5-6000 CL32 memory and a Corsair RM1000x power supply. For SSD storage, we currently have three drives: the 4TB Kingston KC3000, the 1TB PNY XLR8 CS3140, and the 1TB Crucial P5 Plus. Of course, we’re running Windows 11 and have the latest graphics drivers installed for each of our three vendors. The idea here is to make sure our graphics card is the bottleneck even at lower resolutions, and our gaming benchmarks take that into account.
So – let’s get into some gaming benchmarks, shall we? We’ll start with our new test suite, which includes 13 modern and remastered games, over four pages, then do some specific testing of Intel’s XeSS upscaler for DLSS, and end on the last page.
