Intel Arc 2023 Revisit & Benchmarks: A770 & A750 GPU Updated Tests

[Music] revisiting an arc gpus today we haven't tested these in any official capacity since the launch and when they launched we tested them with driver version 3435 which was just before these cards came out that's when that driver package was made now several months later Intel has launched drivers that focus on dx9 performance they've improved frame Time Performance in general across all apis they've targeted specific games so this is a scenario where Intel has rapidly updating drivers in a way that we don't see from Nvidia and AMD because they're pretty stable already and that's good news for Intel Intel has the most ground to gain and at the same time and as a result is able to gain the most ground with each iterative step making each one of them individually exciting so today we're benchmarking the drivers and the changes since launch a few months ago to see how the landscape changes for a750 and a770 gpus before that this video is brought to you by Squarespace we use Squarespace for our own GN store and juggle a complex multi-piece orders all the time with it Squarespace makes it fast for us to roll out new products with detailed Pages full of galleries videos and descriptors it's also useful for your own resume sites for a photographer or projects portfolios or for starting your new small business idea there's never been a better time to try and start your new business than right now and we can vouch that Squarespace makes it easy visit squarespace.com Gamers Nexus to get 10 off your first purchase with Squarespace so the quick updates for you first of all the a750 which is this card is now officially 250 so it's 40 cheaper we have a news video talking about that from a couple days ago and uh that's a pretty big drop jobs from 290 to 250 which makes it instantly more interesting as you compare again say an RX 6600 or a 6600 XT which the 6600 and the XT alike when these cards came out they were more or less sweeping Victory is it it was pretty hard to argue against a 6600 or an XT because as they have driver stability to some extent they have more maturity in general they had better performance and a lot of titles uh but now that's starting to change Intel's most recent driver update ended up being called 4091 and that driver specifically focuses on dx9 so you shouldn't expect improvements in things like the X11 Vulcan dx12 so forth however there have been General improvements in those apis because again we haven't tested this since launch so in between 4091 and 3435 or whatever it is there were at least four other major drivers maybe three and one of those 3802 so in this set of benchmarking we're looking at three driver sets and comparing them for you frame times are really big we're going to talk about those a lot uh and we have some complaints about the software still we're not going to go too deep on that today we already covered that in depth previously but otherwise it's just a simple Benchmark video this is going to be a pretty short one we removed several cards from the charts 40 90 to 700 XTX I think we took out the 4080 30 90 TI 6900 6950 XT Vega 64. in all those instances we took them out to make room because there's like four or five entries for these and they're so high on that it doesn't make sense but if you want that data go check out our 7900 XT review and you'll get all of it okay so we're going to start with fan times originally this was at the back of the video but they are so absolutely insane that we pulled it forward to the front the differences here are pretty huge for the games where frame times were really bad originally and that's good that's what we want to see quick recap on frame times if you don't know so the base metric of FPS which is a rate over time is time and that metric you typically look at the time in milliseconds required to present a frame to the player in some capacity rendered so maybe not fully if it's a runt frame as they are called but you are getting presented some kind of frame in that window of time 16.667 milliseconds would represent 60 FPS and deviations more than 8 to 12 milliseconds start to be maybe noticeable but what's really noticeable is when the frame time the time required to present that frame spikes up and down rapidly which is very uncommon to see these days on Nvidia and AMD super common back in the multi-gpu days with micro stutter especially at AMD so that's the quick recap this was a problem for Intel with Arc and it was a significant problem in CS go specifically and that's one we're going to look at Rainbow Six was another one where they had some frame time issues but otherwise bugs with that game in general so let's get started here's a frame time plot for Rainbow Six Siege lower is better but more consistent is best the original launch driver for the a750 was clearly severely bugged with Rainbow Six as we already saw in the averages when we reviewed it and you'll see again today the actual performance is okay on an individual per frame level but you can see the performance dives from 16 milliseconds to a better eight millisecond result right at the start and then it slowly creeps up to a slower nine and a half millisecond frame time it then plunges back down to four milliseconds which again is technically better but not like this and then it climbs slowly then it skyrockets to 16 to 19 millisecond frame times so this tells a story of inconsistency the red line for the 4091 driver shows us what it should look like there are still occasional spikes that's normal but the absolute performance is much more stable and predictable Intel has resolved this critical issue from launch in Rainbow Six so so that's good their drivers are improving things but this chart is insane the chaos you're watching right now is for CS go the frame times were so wildly inconsistent that we actually had to reduce the line thickness from our standard two-point line to one point on the a750 with the 3802 drivers otherwise it just looked like a fat Blue Line 3802 had it all over the place bouncing from four milliseconds to sometimes 22. this would feel like stuttery garbage in game and it was a frame to frame complete change and it's objectively a bad experience numbers support how bad it is here but the 4091 driver also supports that it's better it completely resolves the problem and it brought us down to more consistent three millisecond frame times with plus or minus two millisecond deviations performance is objectively good with this update as we get into the bar charts now with just FPS numbers comparatively versus the rest of the vendors we're starting with the most is completely ridiculous result this is not true for every game this is an outlier but it's a very important one and it's Rainbow Six Siege we'll look at more normal results you can expect after this some games show absolutely zero difference from launch to today actually probably about half the ones we tested and uh others show something like 10 but in this one there were problems originally and they're fixed here's the chart the original review had the a770 down at 125 of PS average with lows at 56 FPS for 0.1 percent the technical word to describe that performance is terrible really bad the a750 was similarly ranked even the RX 580 which is a GPU from 2017 from 2016 was able to outperform the a770 the 3802 driver fixed Baseline performance and brought it up 89 improved for the a770 now at 236 FPS average lows also improved that 107 FPS average for the 0.1 percent that allows the a770 to surpass the 3050 although the 2060 and the RX 6600 still lead it so Intel still needs to improve significantly to outperform amd's cheaper 6600 series and the 4091 update didn't change much in this regard it pushed to 240 FPS or 1.8 percent and change in average the a750 improved to 90 percent with driver version 3802 from launch and there's a similar small gain with 4091 as to the 770. the 3050 leads the card here although the a750 now beats the 1660 super by 6.7 percent so the ranks are shuffling in a way that's favorable for Intel and that brings us to the two types of gains or improvements you'll see with Intel drivers as they make these major revisions type number one is the game breaking ones the things that you you literally cannot play the game until it is fixed that's the rare kind on the incumbents in the market type number two is just general improvements nice to see but it wasn't probably preventing a purchase outright at 1440p the a770 climbs to 190 FPS average from 106 FPS average originally or 80 uplift 3802 versus 4091 produced no meaningful difference the a750 results for 3802 and 4091 were also about about the same both around 172 to 175 PS average we ran retests on these and the results didn't really move so there appears to be no real change here but there was improvement over the launch day review result of 99 FPS average but as for 802 versus 91 they're basically within error or render on variation of each other this test is for Total War Warhammer 3. starting with 1080p the Intel Arc cards have two main clusters there's a group above the 2070 and then there's one below the 3060. the original review had the a750 at 83 FPS average tested in October with the 3802 driver from shortly after reviews functionally the same even though that one was tested this week the new 4091 driver posts a big enough climb that in most situations we'd have thought it was bad data if not for the fact that Intel's claims match and the a770 posts a similar climb 1491 a750 Improvement to 90 FPS average from 83 is nine percent the a770 improved to 9 to 98 FPS average from 90 FPS average we noticed that 3802 and the launch drivers were again about identical then there's no meaningful Improvement in the frame times or the 0.1 lows either at least in this title it's just in step with the average compared to competition the a770 4091 version now allows the 6700 XT Elite of 15 down from 26 previously so it's getting closer that should put some pressure on amdn Nvidia the 3060 is now beaten by the a770 4091 by 13 and that is up from a three percent lead previously that's a big change three percent isn't really enough to buy one over the other if the one that leads has serious driver problems 13 is starting to become more compelling at 1440p the a770le ran at 68 FPS average with 40 91 or 62 with both 3802 and the original launch drivers uplift is about 10.4 percent for the AC 770 with 4091 with 0.1 percent lows and lockstep the a750 posted a 7.4 uplift from the launch driver to 4091 with 3802 technically regressive on the chart but with an error these results have the 6700 XT only 5.3 percent ahead of the a770 with 4091 down from 17 ahead previously so its lead is dropping the change is once again significant Intel won't get this kind of gain every single time they release driver revisions at least on Alchemist the current architecture but certainly it has more room to post gains at least somewhat like this given that Nvidia and AMD have been in it forever and their drivers are largely optimized already they have to work harder through basically only architecture updates the more interesting a750 has now surpassed the 2070 and the 3060 with the lead over the latter at eight percent previously they were roughly tied but this is the mark in Intel needs to hit a CS go is one of the games until heavily boasted as being improved in the not broken anymore way we don't normally test CS go for gpus it's more of a CPU Benchmark since it's not that GPU intensive but we added it for just this set to validate Intel's claims and they appear to be valid Intel claims a 77 offlift in average FPS from launch to today in our testing we saw a 140 improvement with our approach they might test differently and that was by moving from 3802 to 4091. the lows also changed from being a stuttery mess which will require a frame time plot to properly document the a770s new 307 FPS average result changes its viability for this game the a750 and a770 remain functionally identical in this particular game likely in part thanks to how CPU limited CS go is but at least we're not driver bound anymore in CS go at 1440p we saw results moved from being completely bound up on the drivers at 130 FPS average to 215 FPS average on the a750 or to 235 on the a770 so in this one we're seeing about an 80 uplift on the a770. Final Fantasy 14 is next tested at 1080P and this uses the dx11 API the original results had the a750 at 164 FPS average and the a770 at 173 FPS average 3802 and 4091 for both the a750 and a770 are functionally the same with no meaningful difference between them they're within error of each other from the launch driver to 4091 we observed the 5 Improvement for the a770 at 181 FPS average now and a 4.5 uplift on the a750 this doesn't change much the 6600 XT remains a spot above even the a770 despite a price that is much closer to the a750s price the 750 keeps its spot as far more viable from a value perspective versus only the a770 but with AMD is 666 XT remaining interesting as long as they're still available in the 200s that's the real competition and an important note here we're CPU bound at the top of this chart but that doesn't affect the Intel Arc gpus or the 6600s because they aren't anywhere near the CPU bottleneck 1440p isn't interesting at all once again the high-end non-arc gpus are completely bottlenecked on the CPU so we can't see a difference there but for Arc the cards all perform about the same irrespective of driver version and that has the a770 with all three driver versions within error and run to run variants of each other the 750 was the same with about a 2fps range top to bottom so there's no change in this load we could run this a thousand times on each card and you'd see similar plus or minus two FPS numbers so it's basically just variance an F1 2022 we have a more limited data set due to frequent updates that the game receives we retest for each major update which wipes out the old data the intel a750 on 3802 ran at 99.7 FPS average with the 4091 update changing nothing it's it's a zero percent difference the a770 saw the same 106.1 to 106.6 which is run to run variance although boring this result is important because it tells us that some games just won't benefit from the updates and so this new driver doesn't magically Propel performance to new heights in every scenario F1 at 1440 is the same the results were lower as a result of the increased resolution but the scale of the results remained unchanging between the driver versions and it's still zero percent now we were curious if Vulcan saw any changes so we re-ran strange Brigade as well in this testing the 4091 driver and 3802 posted identical results between the a770 and a750 cards interestingly we noticed that the original driver had marginally higher performance just outside of error but we don't have confidence in that result so we removed it from the chart unless we see something that suggests its accuracy in a firmer way we were able to Repro the result multiple times it just it was a weird result now in Shadow of the Tomb Raider we also saw weirdly aggressive performance against 34-35 we re-ran 34-35 just so it's not dated from October and even today with that driver the result was technically higher at 108 FPS average lows were worse though so our best theory here is that maybe the driver improvement was actually a narrowing of frame time range to get more consistent frame Time Performance resulting in potentially a marginal reduction in the average that you see but a significant Improvement in the lows and to be very clear about this we spoke with Intel about this result as well we basically said is this does this make sense to you is this what you're seeing because sometimes you need to cross validate and they didn't really have any concerns about the data so uh that's what we got our best theory is that in the process of improving the low end so the poor performing frame times they slightly truncated the high end and we've seen that a lot so it's not uncommon Behavior now software we still have some complaints we didn't do a full Deep dive on the drivers and art control this time but a couple of things first of all Intel has now segmented the graphics Command Center as they call it off into Microsoft store which is pretty annoying so it doesn't get pre-installed instead you get Arc control which to us is far less useful Command Center is more like the Nvidia control panel where it looks ancient but it has a lot of things that are really useful Beyond this though it's not the biggest deal it's just it is kind of a messy web of software they have right now uh not very unified the next one that was annoying was every time the monitor went to sleep and we woke it back up there would be a stack of pop-ups halfway up the screen that all came from tell our control and had some kind of report to tell us about uh really unnecessary we're not sure why they're doing that and none of the information is particularly useful so that's where we stopped though it's this was not a deep dive into the software experience we've done that and we did a follow-up when they fixed a lot of those things they've still fixed a lot of those things so that's still good but there's also some weird stuff in here which is the point of mentioning it in this video however to really dig into it we would need to dedicate a full video to it and probably about a week of people actually using it here daily so anyway we'll stop there for that commentary for now um the rest of this the 6700 XT remains in the 300s like 360 370 depending where you look and it's plus or minus a bit but the card is clearly kind of on its way out at this point they're going to replace it not too long from now in theory anyway the a770 remains on the higher side of pricing Intel is very likely to bring this price down as well but for now they haven't so it's at 350 or so uh the a750 is it was better value at launch and it is especially better value than the 770 now because the price is lower and you get the vast majority of performance on a cheaper card you get less memory but it doesn't really matter for for a card of this power level so at this point the biggest change in the competitive landscape is the a750 is now much more competitive with the 3060 and the 6600 the 66 XT that kind of got the recommendation the first time around so it's closer in price than it used to be there's less inventory of those cards than there used to be so it's sometimes the pricing's not good on those devices because the stock is in and out 66 XT still seems pretty good in general just from a quick glance but the 3060 is kind of up and down so the a750 is uh if if only by default is becoming a key choice at that price bracket but even on top of its sort of de facto presence it is also improving in drivers in a way that now allows it to at times when it was at a slight loss before to one of these cards it is now at a slight lead or or at least equal and at times when it had a slight weed that was basically irrelevant especially in the face of being a less mature platform it might now have a more significant say 10 to 13 percent lead like we talked about earlier that is enough to start swimming opinion in its favor even in spite of being on the newer Partners platform so that's all good that's that's what Intel needs they need to do this a lot more we said this last time they're new to this they know they're new to this they're going to have to keep doing these updates it can't just stop here and Intel knows that and they're working on more we will continue to revisit these as they have sort of substantial ones this Benchmark is a collection of the last I don't know five four five months of Intel's changes all in one go so you get the dx9 stuff and everything else in between that's it for this one though quick update for you and we'll keep benchmarking for the next one thanks for watching subscribe for more go to store.com directly we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 636,328

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, intel arc, intel arc 2023, intel arc any good, intel, intel a770 benchmarks, intel a750 benchmarks, intel a770 review, intel a750 review, intel a770 drivers, intel arc drivers

Id: b-6sHUNBxVg

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 02 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/botohowotoh]

I hope Intel manages to fix all (or at least most) of the issues, this is currently the only midrange card with enough RT performance and VRAM going forward.

[u/verkohlt]

Disappointed that idle power consumption was not measured as it was a significant sticking point for Alchemist on release. There was a supposed fix but there are still recent reports of issues.

Would like to know if it is really a hardware issue as comments state or if it is something that can be mitigated with the right settings or software updates.

[u/Firefox72]

Better but still way to inconsistent. In the games it likes its faster than a 6600XT. In the games it doesn't its slower than a 6600. Thats a 20-40% of a sway in performance at times.

The A750 at $250 is not bad and could be a consideration especialy if you are after some of its features. But you can get a 6600 for less and a 6650XT for a comparable price. The A770 though remains terribly priced at $350 and makes absolutely no sense. You can get a 6700XT for that price or a 6700 non XT for $320.

[u/dedoha]

I know that benchmarking takes time but only 7 games and some being not too relevant is a bit disappointing. Maybe hardware unboxed just spoiled me

[u/Satan_Prometheus]

All I really want to know as a potential buyer is whether AMD or Intel has better (read: more stable) drivers at this point. Intel has better RT than AMD IIRC, so to me, presuming that they have less crash-prone drivers, I'd rather just buy Intel. Raw raster performance matters quite a bit less to me than stability.

[u/UpsetKoalaBear]

Anyone know why Intel didn’t use any of their own driver knowledge from their integrated graphics division for the drivers in these?

Seems like a massive misstep as, whilst their integrated graphics are fairly subpar, they at least offered much more consistent performance across API’s rather than what we have here with Arc.

This video shows their Iris Integrated Graphics getting great numbers on DX9. Whilst obviously not comparable to Arc as it is a discrete solution versus an integrated one, it clearly shows that Intel have the knowledge and experience to deliver a consistent experience across API’s on this architecture already.

Just seems like a massive oversight to start from scratch rather than unifying their driver architecture. This is especially apparent because Xe/Iris is built upon the same foundations as Arc, Arc being the Xe-HPG variant, how have we gone backwards?

I’m still hoping they can iron these issues out, but I feel like their shouldn’t have been any issues in the first place/much less prevalent issues? Xe/Iris released in 2020, they had a significant amount of time to fix these problems.

[u/Aleblanco1987]

Nice gains, but I'd like to see a wider variety of games as the performance seems game/engine dependant.

Maybe HWunboxed will provide.

[u/Vegetable-Coat-1956]

I know about someone who managed to bios mod an x79 Chinese motherboard and wants to test some of those arc gpu, looks like those cards will be an interesting budget alternative

[u/Automatic_Work_3010]

Were there any performance improvements for Arc A380 too?