Intel Arc A770 Graphics

Product Information

It’s also important to note that Intel’s Arc GPUs will be arriving late. The company originally planned on formally launching them in the US in Q3, following an earlier delay. However, the Oct. 12 launch date shows the Arc A770 will actually land in Q4. Xe HPG microarchitecture is engineered from the ground-up to deliver high performance, efficiency, and scalability for gamers and creators. Intel Xe Super Sampling technology (XeSS) takes your gaming experience to the next level with AI-enhanced upscaling enabling more performance with high image fidelity. XeSS is optimized for Intel® Arc™ graphics products with the ability to take advantage of XMX AI hardware acceleration. Each XVE can compute eight FP32 operations per cycle. That gets loosely translated into "GPU cores," though we prefer to call them "GPU shaders," and each is roughly (very roughly!) equivalent to an AMD or Nvidia shader. Each Xe-Core thus has 128 shader cores and sort of maps to an (upcoming) AMD RDNA 3 Compute Unit (CU) or an Nvidia Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) — both of which will also have 128 GPU shaders. They're all SIMD (single instruction multiple data) designs, and Arc Alchemist has enhanced the shaders to meet the full DirectX 12 Ultimate feature set. While the 26 fps average minimum fps at 4K means it's really not playable at that resolution even with XeSS turned on, with settings tweaks, or more modest ray tracing, you could probably bring that up into the low to high 30s, making 4K games playable on this card with ray tracing turned on.

So who's right? We'll have to wait and see what kind of wonders these GPU industry titans can work with silicon in the years to come. Intel certainly appears to have capitalized on a weak point in Nvidia's market strategy by queuing up a slate of (comparatively) cheap desktop GPUs just as GeForce 30-series card prices are starting to plummet and their successors are starting to seem wildly overpriced. Enter Intel XeSS. When set to "Balanced", XeSS turns out to be a game changer for the A770, getting it an average framerate of 66 fps (with an average minimum of 46 fps) at 1080p, an average of 51 fps (with an average minimum of 38 fps) at 1440p, and an average 33 fps (average minimum 26 fps) at 4K with ray tracing maxed out. So, without further ado, here's all the important things you need to know about the Arc A770 and A750 GPUs, including where to buy them, their prices and a whole lot more. I spent about two weeks with the Intel Arc A770 in total, with a little over half that time using it as my main GPU on my personal PC. I used it for gaming, content creation, and other general-purpose use with varying demands on the card.

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The power connector is an 8-pin and 6-pin combo, so you'll have a pair of cables dangling from the card which may or may not affect the aesthetic of your case, but at least you won't need to worry about a 12VHPWR or 12-pin adapter like you do with Nvidia's RTX 4000-series and 3000-series cards. Intel breaks up its architecture into "render slices", which contain 4 Xe Cores, which each contain 128 shaders, a ray tracing processor, and 16 matrix processors (which are directly comparable to Nvidia's vaunted tensor cores at least), which handle graphics upsampling and machine learning workflows. Both 8GB and 16GB versions of the A770 contain eight render slices for a total of 4096 shaders, 32 ray processors, and 512 matrix processors.

Intel's Arc series of GPUs has meant that it's now a three horse race as Team Blue looks to provide a formidable alternative to the longstanding dichotomy between AMD and Nvidia's entries that gamers have faced for ages. To help you decide whether they're worth a go, we've rounded up everything you need to know about the Arc A770 and A750, from their price and performance to where you can actually buy them in the US, UK, Canada and Europe. Among all the cards tested, the Intel Arc A770 was at nearly the bottom of the list with the RX 6700 XT, so the picture for this card might have been very different had it launched three years ago and it had to compete with the RTX 3000-series and RX-6000 series exclusively. In the end, this card performs like a last-gen card, because it is. All told, then, the Intel Arc A770 turns out to be a surprisingly good graphics card for modern gaming titles that can sometimes even hold its own against the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti. It can't hold a candle to the RX 7700 XT or RTX 4070, but it was never meant to, and given that those cards cost substantially more than the Arc A770, this is entirely expected.You can buy the Arc A770 and Arc A750 from a range of major European retailers, which we've summarised in a handy table below. It seems especially strange that there's only one UK retailer earmarked in Ebuyer, but if there happens to be more, we'll be sure to add them here. Retailer The only real disadvantage of these cards is their DX9 and DX11 performance, graphics APIs that have become much less popular over the last five years but make up a large proportion of older games. Here, the Intel GPUs are hamstrung by a relatively immature driver and performance suffers as a result. Similarly, you shouldn't get the Arc GPUs if your system doesn't support Resizeable BAR, a technology that allows more direct access to GPU memory - without it enabled, performance tanks. Thankfully, most motherboards made in the last three plus years do support the feature. What are the prices of the Arc A770 and A750? You're also getting three DisplayPort 2.0 outputs and an HDMI 2.1 output, which puts it in the same camp as Nvidia's recent GPUs, but can't match AMD's recent move to DisplayPort 2.1, which will enable faster 8K video output. As it stands, the Intel Arc A770 is limited to 8K@60Hz, just like Nvidia. Will you be doing much 8K gaming on a 16GB card? Absolutely not, but as we get more 8K monitors next year, it'd be nice to have an 8K desktop running at 165Hz, but that's a very speculative prospect at this point, so it's probably not anything anyone looking at the Arc A770 needs to be concerned about. That's a nice change of pace from AMD, which to date hasn't done much with ray tracing and tends to downplay its importance. And to be fair, AMD has a point: the visual fidelity gains that come from enabling ray tracing are often far outweighed by the loss of performance. Especially on AMD's GPUs. The specs of the new Intel Arc series GPUs aren't half bad for the price, and bring with them some intriguing features, too. You can see this for yourself in our table below.

Those are the launch MSRPs from October 2022, of course, and the cards have come down considerably in price in the year since their release, and you can either card for about 20% to 25% less than that. This is important, since the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD Radeon RX 7600 are very close to the 16GB Arc A770 cards in terms of current prices, and offer distinct advantages that will make potential buyers want to go with the latter rather than the former. Unleash your imagination and captivate audiences with rich digital content creation using a hyper advanced media engine, augmented by AI and accelerated by Intel® Deep Link technology. Create compelling content, powered by the first graphics card with support for all current leading media formats, and keep yourself up to date with the most advanced AV1 video encode capabilities. On one level, Arc Alchemist would be the 13th iteration of Intel Graphics. At the same time, we'd also mark this down as generation one. There are enough major overhauls of the fundamental design, features, and functionality that a card like the A770 has very little in common with Intel's current 12th-Gen integrated Xe Graphics. There are several new additions to the GPU that provide a clear demarcation between the pre-Arc and the post-Arc world of Intel GPUs. Intel's Xe HPG architecture inside the Arc A770 introduces a whole other way to arrange the various co-processors that make up a GPU, adding a third, not very easily comparable set of specs to the already head-scratching differences between Nvidia and AMD architectures. According to Gelsinger, Intel heard complaints from gamers about the high prices. “You should be frustrated because you are losing out as a gaming community. And today, we’re fixing that."

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang justified the high prices of these cards by claiming that Moore's Law is dead, stating "the idea that the chip is going to go down in price is a story of the past" in an interview with Digital Trendsand PC World. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger disagrees, stating in his Intel Innovation keynote that "Moore's Law is alive and well" according to Marketwatch. Of course, our full review on both the Arc A770 and A750 will give you all the details you need as to how fast these cards are, but in short, they'll be more than good enough for those who want solid 1080p gaming. The A770 is comparable to an RTX 3060 and an RX 6600 XT in terms of price and performance, as is the A750 too, which actually offered benchmark results that were rather similar to the A770, with a percentage margin of between three and 10 percent in favour of the A770.