A Look at the INTEL ARC A770

player 3 is entering the game as rock is Intel Arc and I've got the a770 to take a look at yes [Music] wait a minute this card looks familiar this is a card with eight gigabytes of gddr6 three DisplayPort outputs and one HDMI output there's so many dirt cheap graphics cards on the market today compared with a few years ago because of the crypto crash and everything else so why is Intel appealing now well Intel's got the software engineering team we've got the hardware chops they know their platform they know pcie could be interesting could be interesting at the mid Market certainly Intel would find at the market appealing from a profitability standpoint now for our test system we're going to be using z790 our Tai Chi Carrera it's a monster with a 3900k of course because that's a thing but I don't actually know if I really recommend a 13900k I mean if you're going to Shell out for 3900k you shouldn't be getting an a770 you should be getting a higher end GPU this is positioned possibly as a 6600 6700 30 60 30 70-ish competitor that may actually be a stealth surprise win on the Linux side of things some pretty good encoders and that sort of thing I do think it's pretty Genius of ASRock to basically recycle their Phantom gaming design from other gpus and just adapt their existing he-sync and fan solution for the Intel Arc a770 cuts down on manufacturing costs I'm sure makes it a little easier for parts availability and everything else and it's a dual 8-pin connection for power so okay too much let's take a look at the benchmarks so as expected this is a reasonable card for 1080p if we look at our performance results and we look at Borderlands 3 it's a pretty playable experience it's pretty good overall I mean at 1080p we're getting 118 FPS so it's pretty buttery smooth our one percent lows are only about 61 FPS but above 60 we do maintain that it's pretty good clearly Intel has some room to improve their drivers but this is a pretty good experience shadow of the Tomb Raider of course is 127 FPS an older title but you know that's fine 98 FPS for Horizon zero Dawn cyberpunk 2077 this is a kind of a surprise 76 FPS I wasn't expecting cyberpunk to work this well now I did fiddle with the graphics settings a little bit on these games I spent some time playing and I spent some time running benchmarks a little bit of artificial benchmarks a little bit of actual gameplay I was surprised how good it was because things that weren't really quite this good with the 380. and Deus Ex mankind divided 142 FPS again an older title just wanted to see how that works because I think that the danger is some of the older games maybe struggle a little bit supposed to really just be DirectX 9 but I don't really want to get into the particulars of that it just has to do with how DirectX works and what Intel has done for DirectX handling on the older stuff but uh you know overall this is really a show of 1080p let's move up to 1440p though because really this is a 1440p card they're moving up to 1440 there wasn't really as much of a performance falloff as I might have expected of 83 FPS and Borderlands that's not bad and it really didn't negatively impact our one percent lows all that much 47 FPS I mean okay 40 50 60 FPS but still moving up to 1440p this works pretty well shadow of the Tomb Raider was still 96 FPS Horizon zero Dawn was 91 FPS this is a really good showing for this car I mean this is only just over a 300 card cyberpunk was able to maintain an average over 64 FPS or over 60 FPS which is pretty nice Without Really dialing down the graphic settings too much and generally that was my experience in most games AAA titles newer ones and middle aged ones shout out of the Tomb Raiders middle age to elderly it's it's getting pretty old but this is a really pretty good showing so I decided hey let's try 4K you know eight gigabytes of memory with 4K that's maybe asking a little much and yeah there are rough edges in the drivers Horizon zero Dawn and some other games they would keep crashing fortnite especially I mean we got through the benchmarks but fortnite should theoretically I would think be able to run at 4K with this particular card maybe you might turn things down to medium but maybe people do that anyway for competitive play ah it was a little janky and so again the weak spot of this card is really the drivers and software support you can tell that Intel has put a lot of work in and a ton of work in short order but that's going to be the rough spot with this car foreign [Music] [Music] so what's the verdict well it's an interesting path that we've taken to get here the arc a770 is not a completely incompetent graphics card it's actually pretty good and I'm happy to report that on Linux it has come a very long way in very short order it is promising it's promising for the future I'm a little disappointed that there's not any kind of features like Sr iov or Intel gbtg on the Linux side of things but you'd have to follow more on the level one Linux channel to get exposure to that kind of content in that sort of edge case because I think we're long past the era of having a GPU that you can share among multiple virtual machines or multiple containers easily when Nvidia enables that very careful cookie cutter ways with things like Cuda if you run Cuda on Windows you can have containers that are Cuda based and you know they've done a really good job making sure you don't accidentally run a virtual machine that has GPU acceleration which I think is is Criminal and Intel can definitely fix that they're in a position to do that because they control the CPU the bus and the uh the GPU or they could add extensions to the bus as necessary to properly support that so surprised that there's not even a little bit of Plumbing there for that that I can find but in terms of a gaming GPU Gamers don't really care about that that's a mini feature that's not a real world feature there's there's dozens of us but for gaming it's actually was a little surprising so this card will struggle with older games older DirectX Intel really didn't spend a lot of time with that and that's another area where Linux really shines because you can actually run things that will translate old DirectX into modern Vulcan on Modern Linux distros and that will run better then this card runs natively on Windows you can actually get really good performance so best case scenario in some game benchmarks as we saw you could get 30 70 levels of performance from Nvidia pretty good but it's a little inconsistent so I'd say that this is a card that if you can get for a deal and nothing else is available then it might make sense this is also a card that if you like av1 and encoding it might make sense although amd's new gpus are right around the corner they're releasing in December around December 15th with retail availability plus or minus and those look like they're going to be h.265 av1 monsters so maybe something to keep in mind Now intel has been at the Forefront in terms of uh acceleration for things like Premiere your quick sync your igpu and while those features are not complete on this card one assumes that Intel will use its 800 pound gorilla status to lean on Nvidia to try to get them to implement those kinds of acceleration for this card and that'll be nice but a lot of these things that I'm describing are things that could come soon not things that are here now a little bit of a problem in terms of what ASRock has done for Intel and putting this together it's a competent card it has good cooling the fans actually turn off because it's sitting here not doing anything it's only got I think one fan no yeah right now all three fans are off because it's idling and it's not really doing much Intel got the power management and everything else correct the drivers have improved dramatically over the last month or so actually Steve from Gamers Nexus let me borrow an A380 I've been experimenting with that and the first video on that was all fire and brimstone and oh my gosh I can't believe it blah blah blah but just a few short weeks later pretty much everything that I was going to complain about with the A380 has been fixed so Intel's on top of it they're putting engineering resources into it uh this might be a card that's going to be even more fine wine than the AMD fine wine just because they're going to spend so much time on the drivers and solving problems and getting and getting to the other side of issues okay bottom line for the performance that I was getting this is kind of surprising it really is somewhere between a 3060 TI and a 3070. 30 60 TI 3070 you know these are still going for 500-ish dollars even a little bit more for the least expensive competing cards this is 329 so this is a much better deal in terms of dollars but it might take a little bit more investment of time on your part to dial in game settings or find the right combination of settings in a driver or just avoiding certain combinations of the cause problems like in Horizon zero Dawn when you exceed texture memory instead of handling that gracefully it just seems to crash and they're probably aware of that and it's probably going to be fixed in fact when I was filming this there were a couple of things I was going to mention that have since been fixed in the latest driver update so again enter tell is super on top of this but you know non-women can't have a baby in a month in terms of project management and doing the software and scaling out the team that's handling this kind of thing so I get it I get it Intel is working on this and that's really what's going to bring it home that said AMD is also in the game and I think the competition from AMD is a Little Bit Stronger everybody wants to buy Nvidia Nvidia has the Mind share but a lot of the competing AMD cards are at a lower price point with just as good or even better performance than Nvidia and that sort of gives Intel a run for the money with The Arc a770 I think bottom line though this is the least expensive card for the most performance but you've got some potential quirks that you might have to work through so keep that in mind overall this is not bad for really a first consumer showing though I think Intel is going to be really formidable in the second and third generation so hopefully Nvidia and AMD are not asleep at the wheel I know some of these things are definitely on Intel's radar because they talked about the Creator engine their next-gen creation engine which is going to leverage your you your built-in GPU and your processor plus this plus some other stuff Intel's definitely saying this thing pairs with an Intel GPU really well which is what we did for our testing you know sort of best case scenario to see how it goes they also have Intel deep link you know better together that's the core processor plus the art Graphics which is what I'm talking about they call it hyperin code and stream assist and so this will leverage both sets of encoding Hardware because you know technically the 3900k it has the igpu as I keep talking about and you can leverage both of those things to get stuff done but again the software the software needs to be a little bit farther along in order for this to really be a super compelling thing honestly the most compelling use case for this was adding it as a second GPU to your system to support more monitors the av1 encode and that sort of thing but maybe newer gen gpus will do that it's also really baffling so like Nvidia still has a DisplayPort 1.4 on their gpus which is you know 4K 120 hertz unless you get into display stream compression and even Intel's doing a better job than that here so so after doing a real world stuff with The Arc and playing games what are my thoughts it's surprisingly good it has some rough edges and if you're a tinkerer and a gear Head those rough edges probably aren't going to bother you if you enjoy older DirectX 9 based games it's not an ideal situation and as we saw even with Horizon zero Dawn and fortnite there can still be rough edges in the drivers that I'm sure Intel is aware of 330 dollars versus you know 500 plus if you want to go team green I mean those cards are priced to move so if you're a tinkerer and a Gearhead and you and you've done the price comparison shopping and you want a card that performs Somewhere Between the 3060 TI and a 3070 in many but not all scenarios be sure to check your game and check Arc performance then it can be a good deal those are my thoughts if you have a specific game you want me to test engage with me on the level one forums I'm signing out and you can find me there [Music]

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 45,321

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: EmvJJRUKlNI

Length: 14min 33sec (873 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 23 2022