The Arc graphics cards are priced to take on the popular Turing 3060 for budget PC gaming. If you want more power for 1440p gaming, you can upgrade to the Arc A770, which costs $329 If Intel can keep them low, these prices will be amazing. The whole story of Intel's Arc push will be priced if it can.
Intel is not trying to take on the top cards. Mainstream PC users are looking for graphics cards that are capable of high definition gaming. It is a huge market for Intel to tackle because it is still the most popular resolution for PC games. The retail price of the Arc A750 is less than the retail price of the RTX 3060 and the A770.
In my week of testing both cards, the A750 and A770 were both capable of a good quality experience. Graphics cards aren't perfect. It is clear that Intel has been doing graphics for laptops for a long time. The drivers are very basic compared to other companies, there have been a few bugs, and some game developers are going to have to modify their games to work with Intel's new graphics cards.
After months of delays, Intel finally got Arc out the door and it's impressive.
The Arc A750 and A770 have the same design and only one difference is a strip of LEDs. Both have a matt finish that doesn't pick up fingerprints and is good at keeping dust at bay. The cards look great in a case with a side panel, and I think they are just as attractive as the cards from Nvidia.
Corsair HX 1000 PSU: Corsair HX 1000
There is a singleHDMI port at the rear. If you use a DisplayPort to HDMI cable, you can use HDMI 2.1. It will be up to third-party vendors to support similar integrations as Intel has integrated PCONs that will convert DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1 on its own Arc cards here.
They don't take up a lot of room in a case because they use two fans and a large copper Vapor chamber to keep them cool. If you want to play Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing enabled at 1440p, you will need to connect up both a six-pin and eight-pin power connection to the side. During the same test, the A750 peaked at 373 watt. The total board power rating for both of them is over 200 watt.
If you want to fully control the A770, you will need to connect a separate cable to your board. Most card manufacturers have a separate cable for this control.
At the time of writing, we don't know what these will look like or how they'll be priced compared to Intel's Arc cards. As we have seen with the $329 list price of the RTX 3060, that isn't always the case.
Regardless of the different price points and memory configurations, the Turing 3060 is the closest competitor to the two cards. I have been testing the Arc A750 and the A770 against each other over the last week. Due to a tight review embargo and not having immediate access to an RTX 3060, I haven't been able to compare the two cards, but I think you'll see from the numbers that these cards are going to comfortably trade blows with an RTX.
I have been testing a variety of games across both1080p and 1440p, including Intel's new XeSS competitor to Nvidia'sDLSS. The majority of games run at 60 frames per second with ultra or high settings enabled, and the results are good for both cards. When ray tracing is enabled, the Arc A750 can deliver up to 60 frames per second.
The A770 is a good choice if you want to stretch the extra $40. If you want to keep the settings cranking up to ultra, it simply delivers that extra bit of performance. You need to change the detail settings on the Arc A750.
The Arc GPUs are the best in the games. Most modern games support DirectX 12 or have a beta version of support, and we use a mix of games in our benchmark that lean more towards the newer version of the game. If you play a lot of older DirectX 11 games, it is worth looking at other reviews that compare some of these older titles on Arc graphics cards.
The Arc A750 doesn't work well with ray tracing on Cyberpunk 2077. The only game that supports XeSS is Hitman 3. Frame rates are lifted by nearly 10 frames per second. Drop settings if you want to use ray tracing here. It is not surprising to see the Arc A750 struggle more here.
I tested both cards in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and found that XeSS didn't have a big effect on the performance of either card. The Arc A770 jumps 9 percent with XeSS quality enabled, but the RTX 3060 Ti jumps 24 percent. Better results are produced for Hitman 3 as well. If you want to boost performance, you need to balance it out, but if you want to maintain visual quality, you need to keep the quality.
There aren't enough games that support XeSS at the moment. Thanks to the amount of time it has been in the market and the number of games that support it, Nvidia has an obvious lead.
The amount of time in market affects the software and drivers on the Arc A750 and A770. The drivers and software are very basic and only allow you to tinker with settings in games with an app. I would like to see more of this because of the superior features and customizability offered by the two companies.
I had a lot of weird driver issues. As I looked around for other first-person shooter options, I thought I would give Valorant a try. It wouldn't launch. The drivers for the Arc A380 were broken and Intel issued a new driver to fix them. There are indications that games will need to be updated.
The Steam version of Control can only be launched with the A750 and A770, not the other way around. The game was still running even though I launched the exe. It was a reminder that there are some strange bugs here and there, and that I was able to work around this by adding a launch variable to Control on steam.
The minimum requirements for the game are not met on my PC when I launch it on the A750 and A770. Flight Simulator runs fine, but it shows that games aren't always ready to support the new Arc graphics cards. I am confident that other reviewers will have the same issues that I have with other games, and I hope that Intel can respond quickly here. In August, Intel said it was learning what it would take for it to be successful.
Intel has been maintaining integrated drivers across a variety of laptops for decades, so it certainly has the expertise to improve things. I am wary of game compatibility for the launch period as Intel has traditionally not focused on the types of games it is designed to power.
We will definitely be back to check out XeSS once there are more games that support it. Competition will make both companies push to win over the people who play video games.
There is a boost for those willing to pick the more expensive A770 card if they want to move to 1440p. I think the A750 and A770 will do well at an important budget level of the PC gaming market. They don't come close to the price of a RTX.
If you want to buy an A750 or A770, you should read every review. There will be some performance limitations for certain games with the new Arc cards from Intel. It is important that your game runs well before you consider going to Intel.
I think Intel's Arc cards are an exciting and much needed entrant into the PC gaming space, I just hope Intel is in this for the long run. We have waited a long time to see what Intel can do and the results will impress budget PC gaming.
Tom Warren took the photographs.
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