Intel Arc GPUs Are FINALLY Worth Buying! 🙌

graphics card prices suck this may not come as much as a surprise to you it's been like this for ages I mean granted it's slightly better than it was but with a recent launch of this which is the 6600 XT which is basically the same card with more vram for more money or of course the refresh gpus from Nvidia that granted are okay but they certainly aren't anything gamechanging all of these cards have something in common which is that they cost literally hundreds of pounds of dollars something that doesn't though is Intel Arc with price is starting from roughly $120 I mean the prices of these have come down so much and there have been so many driver updates that have dramatically improved the gaming performance that this is something we're going to have to test so join me to find out whether Intel Ark is actually worth buying and show you the full experience right after a short word from this video sponsor gigabyte aurus 16x is here bringing the best of PC gaming in a portable package this gaming Beast packs the latest 14th gen Intel processors with up to a 24 core I 94900 HX for unbelievable performance not only that but with nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 and 4060 mobile Graphics chips you'll get up for rate racing DSS super resolution and frame generation get yours today with the link down below let us Begin by playing a quick game that I like to call Rapid Fire unboxing and essentially you've got the a300 500 and 700 range it's only the 500 and 700 at the moment that you should pay very close attention to because the gaming performance drops off massively when you go to the 300 series and it's not really that much cheaper but all of these cards have av1 encoders so they're pretty future proof for productivity and streaming and things this is the Intel Ark a750 this is their own version I thought was going to be limited edition but maybe I'm just mistaken on that because you can definitely get hold of this yeah it says on the back limited edition I've seen one of these actually available on NewEgg for under $200 but it's a very Sleek modern looking graphics card actually I think everyone's going to love this I mean actually this is one of the better designs I've seen I mean it's not quite as nice as the really expensive Founders Edition from Nvidia but when it costs under $200 clearly most people are going to well rather pay this amount of money for their graphics cards but obviously the performance is going to be massively different one thing that you do need to be aware of though is the fact that you do have an 8 pin and a six pin on this card whereas most cards that sort of compete with this like the uh 6600 from AMD that is going to use a lot less power actually so you won't need such a big power supply and this will obviously cost you more money to run over time but depends where you live and how much electricity is as to whether this actually really matters but it could uh make a fair bit of difference actually when it comes to noise levels but we'll be testing that a little bit later this one is a more recent release actually this one is from ASRock it is the a580 Challenger and it seems as if you guys in the US have a lot better availability than us over here in Bight this will save you roughly $40 or so versus the a750 which actually is pretty dramatic when you think that this is only a $200 card this one actually certainly looks to be a fair bit bigger it's quite a tall graphics card which is unusual for something as small as this in terms of power we've actually got two eight pins on this but this of course also means you can overclock it and Intel cards do like to overclock actually you can probably get an extra 5 to 10 performance sort of increase as long as your thermals are okay um but this is definitely more of like a aftermarket design I mean when you actually look at the PCB on the back kind of looks a little bit ridiculous in a way but I mean it certainly doesn't look bad it's just that's the like card itself and then this is obviously all of the calling solution but they're not going to win any awards for the absolute best designs they're quite plasticky but hey it's all about gaming performance on a budget and I'm all about that oh and by the way before we move on I do also want to say that the io is pretty good on both of these cards you've got three display port 1.4s and then you have HDMI 2.1 which means you can do 4K 120 like a monitor or a TV which obviously isn't going to be that useful for sort of like modern day games but if you're like me you like to go back and like revisit older titles so at the moment I'm doing things like dead space or recently I did Tomb Raider Anniversary anything like that assuming the drivers are up to it we'll be testing this in just a second then yeah you probably could output 4K 120 so pretty useful port to have but let's now take this opportunity to upgrade or I suppose technically it's a downgrade but I think it would be useful actually if editor Carl could bring up the full price of this rig now we swapped out the GPU very reasonable let's once again grab our keyboard and mouse and the most important thing the PCC mouse mat grab yours with the link down below a 10 HP monitor and then let's turn this baby on I mean that is silent but that is basically the air cooler you'd almost think it wasn't on right here we are we're in of course the first thing we need to do is actually grab the new driver last time I had installation issues which is why I do actually want to show you the full process we used the beta driver this one came out on the 24th of January which is only a week ago and honestly this is going to be make or break really for me when it comes to Ark because last time it was just so frustrating actually getting even just a basic thing like a driver to install to work properly but I know we've come on such a long way some of these numbers are absolutely ridiculous I mean just cause 4 up to 268 per more performance I mean even 26% average frame rate boost in Apex Legends all of these things are great to see I'm actually really excited to test this now installation complete I mean that did take a while I'll be honest but we're good it just says reboot required and this is actually a good opportunity to say if you haven't already please make sure that you update your Motherboard BIOS and ensure that resize bar is on because it makes such a massive difference on Arc gpus that I think they've actually said on record that if your system doesn't support rebar then like buy an Nvidia card which is quite a bold statement but yeah I'm pretty sure this will be on by default cuz it's a newer board actually is it under chipset yes so you want above 4G decoding enabled and then azrock call it clever access memory so it was indeed enabled by default just got to decide now what games to play and I definitely want to try some oldo titles as you can now see I've taken this opportunity to have a little bit of a rearrange so you can see it a little bit better and it's also nice to see that our overlay this is our MSI After Burner overlay seems to be working as well I couldn't get any overlays really to properly work other than the uh inbuilt Arc one on the original system that I built about year and a half ago with Arc so that is definitely an improvement but can we get this to actually record we should be able to hit this capture button got it set to av1 and hopefully that won't really affect the frame rate yes that's exactly what I wanted this was so infuriating again on on the original Arc system that I built cuz as soon as I started recording then everything just went to crap it wasn't actually using the av1 encoder as far as I can tell and it was doing it with the CPU which would mean that the whole frame rate would just tank in the game here we've lost what about three frames a second or so so obviously you can add that back on but we do all of our gameplay recording on the systems themselves because we want this to be as real world as possible and to be honest a little bit of a worst case scenario we're currently running this at about 60 to 65 frames a second not sure what settings we have running actually though has it remembered what I had the other day which was actually with rate tracing that would be very impressive uh we've got vrs set to Quality we can actually change this to Intel xes as it should look slightly better set that to Quality and then everything else is actually set to Epic other than rage racing which is indeed on and set to medium and yes I know this is only 1080p but on this 24in screen size it still looks really good I I'm genuinely impressed here with Arc I mean no one really needs a higher frame rate than this and no one really needs to be playing above 1080p I mean it's nice to have but if you want to put together a very affordable gaming system then this is absolutely going to do the trick and you can do this at Epic settings with rage racing medium that's very very cool that's not very cool though got to start again now but this does at least give me a chance to show you a little bit more of the frame rate and as we do engage in some combat you can see that actually the system is holding up very well as a whole still around about 60 frames a second or so but yeah perfect way to play the game nice and smooth not getting any sort of sudden judders or stutter or anything at the moment and to be fair while the game can get a bit more intensive when you get to the underwater bit sorry about the spoilers I still think you're going to be getting about 45 to 50 frames a second or so really and if you did want to get an even higher frame rate then obviously go to video and you can turn rate tracing off I will also say that the game felt very responsive latency is definitely something that's quite a Hot Topic when it comes to RT cuz you turn it on and sometimes the frame rate's high but just the way the game feels really does go down the toilet but that wasn't so much of a case here I mean the frame rate hasn't actually changed drastically we're getting around about 70 to 80 frames a second now so what's that like 15% performance Improvement something like that genuinely very impressed hm I was about to say let's move on to our next game which is some Dead Space 2 because remember that Arc traditionally had has had some issues with older titles and they released new drivers depending on what people want and obviously priority wise games that sort of have more players will get seen to First essentially um and there's been quite a few updates and Driver updates and things like that since but clearly Dead Space already has run into a little bit of an issue here where it doesn't actually see the native refresh rate of the screen which is a little bit odd the highest I can go is 1,400 by 1050 top tip by the way for anyone that does have issues like this make sure that you are actually showing hidden files and folders within your settings and then if you go into your app data local and then in this case EA Games Dead Space 2 you should be able to find an any file you can edit in notepad and then you're looking for the resolution and you should be able to change it manually and then it will sort of pop up in the game it's more just a case of like for whatever reason the graphics driver isn't presenting uh the resolution or the options for the display properly to the game but here's our width 1,400 so we're going to change that to 1920 and then our height obviously will be 1080 hit save and then relaunch the game I'm hoping this works if it doesn't you can also make that file read only uh but yeah it looks as if this seems to be working fine we've got a nice 1080p display I mean to be fair it's not as if we're going to need to spend loads of time benchmarking this I just want to get a rough idea of how older games are going to run on Arc because they're not going to get that driver support that you'll find on like the newer AAA titles and the frame rate is certainly very good right I mean no one's going to complain surely about like 170 to 240 frames a second but whether it's working as efficiently as it perhaps could do I guess that's more of the question so are you happy that your driver overhead might be higher than otherwise would need to be because I can't like guarantee this oh going to have to blur the out car it's not suitable for YouTube I mean there is defin be quite a lot of variance cuz that's jumped all the way up to 300 frames a second now but I mean crucially we're not getting any sort of horrible spikes or anything like that the frame rate is very smooth and even if you could get maybe slightly higher on a equivalent Nvidia card or AMD not saying you could but I mean that's the sort of issue that you could run into with Arc with the driver overheads and things I think Dead Space gets the seal of approval just be aware that our utilization is only about 72% which means either there's a driver overhead issue or we could be running into a CPU Boton neck but again personally in this instance I don't really think it matters it would more be in like a multiplayer title where want Sky High frame rates but then those are probably the sort of titles that Intel would prioritize with their driver updates anyway so it's less likely to be an issue let's jump all the way back though to a simpler time 2008 when two Raider underworld gray star screens and again you might think it's a bit odd that I'm playing older titles this is the last one I promise but it's because Arc is notoriously difficult when it comes to running older versions of games or older versions of direct X and this is pretty much a very similar story actually to what we had before so we're getting about 176 frames a second or so would help if I didn't keep like falling down the pit but yeah around about 180 200 frames a second or so so you're going to get overheads from the game engine itself which will stop like crazy high frame rates but I imagine if intel wanted you to get even higher level of performance than this then they could make some extra tweaks and you'd get even higher frame rates but as as far as I'm concerned anything over like 120 150 is still good no issues with smoothness this seems to open fine it didn't have any problems finding the resolution this time so yeah gets my seal of approval I I really don't know where to go there they don't put this in games anymore that's definitely not going in the video hello everyone this is a bit unusual but this is actually future markers here because I was very upset that Starfield wasn't running properly we' cut a lot out the video but essentially we were just getting around about 15 frames a second and then all the way up to I don't know I think was like 30 frames a second Max when everything was set to low uh I didn't believe this I did some research and essentially other people were reporting around about 50 to 60 frames a second so here we are having literally just restarted the game and it does seem to be working a whole lot better I mean as you can see from the frame rate graph it's not the smoothest thing in the world but this is certainly very playable I mean I wouldn't have an issue with this this granted is set to low settings so let's see what happens if we do decide to turn it back up now but I don't know what that was all about pretty uh pretty disappointing to be honest with you this was still an example of a game that hasn't really run as well as you'd like but at least you can run it I mean here we have it set to medium now hopefully our frame rate will improve uh no not really so yeah this is another example of what I was talking about so maybe it varies depending on the region that you're in but for whatever reason as soon as you turn the settings up the graphics card kind of gives up so this could just be my system could just be this instance could be something with the graphics driver the game version I'm not sure but other people are reporting better results than me but I can only go off what we have and here we have around about 24 frames a second so I mean let's try it on medium Dynamic resolution off maybe this is why people are actually reporting better frame rates cuz they've got Dynamic resolution set to on and they don't realize no this hasn't really improved it so my advice would be set it to low restart the game and then run it like that and you should get around about 45 to 50 frames a second which as I say was perfectly playable but Starfield definitely does not run properly for me you have been warned our next title though I'm sure everyone will want to play or at least be interested in the performance of it will give us our multiplayer indicator so this is some fortnite and the first load was a little bit slow which was a bit odd but we do seem to be running nice and smoothly now we're currently sitting at around about 55 frames of second or so this is in direct X12 mode and we do also have the settings at a mix of high to Epic so I think we can sort of tweak this to get a slightly higher frame rate actually but I mean this isn't blowing me away I I guess I'm just almost confused cuz again how could it be so well optimized in something like returnal where you're able to run race racing and yet in fortnite we're not really maxing out our frame rate I mean we can cheat and use the performance mode which will give us a much higher frame rate but then obviously the game looks way worse let's see what we can actually do to improve this a little bit though cuz I'd like to get about 100 frames a second if possible we'll change TSR down to high few distance we want epic cuz that will help us out a can go medium postprocessing medium right there we go what has that done to our frame rate I mean basically nothing we're still around about 60 frames a second or so I mean the game feels very smooth especially on this High refresh rate monitor but I don't know just part of me expected to get like slightly more if I'm honest with you it's not that I'm disappointed but as I say in something like returnal where you were getting like a relatively like punching above its weight frame rate it's just it's just a bit weird I I still think it's slightly unpredictable as you don't know quite how well your game is going to run I me at least it's smooth but it's not exactly going to blow your socks off when it comes to FPS let's do one final tweak TSR low Global illumination off Reflections off view distance high postprocessing low and once again it's just not really made a drastic amount of difference I came in this with the target of 100 FPS and we haven't been able to do it so yes you'll have to use the performance mode if you do want to get as high a frame rate as possible but I mean casual gamers will still be really happy with this this is a gaming PC on a real budget and it is doing a fantastic job of getting there I do think you'll probably get a slightly higher frame rate on the 6600 and this is a graphics card that doesn't really cost that much more it's around about $200 or $210 uh rather than the1 170 but that $40 will be significant if you're trying to build a gaming PC for as low a cost as possible then you can't like just you know spend an extra $40 on everything cuz suddenly that's $400 so you've got a lot to think about but we can't just look at this graphics card in isolation I don't think that would be very fair and it wouldn't really tell you the full story so we have spent a very long time benchmarking basically every GPU you can buy today I say we it's purely editor call so I think it's only fair we hand it over to him to walk you through how art compares to everything else hello everybody it's me me editor Carl and I'm here to start things off with the 1440p numbers as this is a bit of a strange one for Arc I'm still yet to work out whether these Arc gpus overperform in 1440p or whether they underperform in 1080P across the five games we tested we saw that the arc gpus comfortably outperform the RX 6600 and nvidia's closest pric rival the RTX 3050 the RTX 3050 currently cost £220 in the UK which is about5 more than the Ark a750 by you're getting much lower FPS with some games the 8 GB of vram in these cards can be a limitation as we saw much bigger differences between the RX 7600 and the 16 GB 7600 XT in Ratchet and Clank as well as in Forza Horizon whereas in the other titles those gpus are much closer together though when you focus more on the Intel art cards they offer really competitive numbers for the price that they cost in returnal the a750 is just 5 FPS slower than the RTX 460 a GPU which costs £70 more than the a750 or you can think of it as 33% more money for an increase in fps of just 4.5% in this particular title of course at 1080p the RX 6600 seems to come back fighting or the arc gpus seem to drop off I'm still undecided of course these games were tested at some of the highest presets so if you want you can always lower some of the settings to high or medium and see a decent bump in frame rates again we see a big difference between the 16 gig RX 7600 XT and the other gpus in Ratchet and Clank as well as Forza Horizon 5 but don't forget you're paying a lot for that privilege as this card is currently around £320 in the UK though we didn't test it the RX 6700 XT is still available for the same price as the 7600 XT but it offers around 10 to 15% more FPS and still has more than enough vram for today's games with 12 GB I did quickly test rate tracing in cyberpunk more to see how the Intel cards compared to the AMD ones and it's quite embarrassing for AMD as Intel's first gen GPU outperforms their newer more expensive rdna 3G gpus in the raate tracing Ultra preset of course the RTX 4060 is looking a little dumb in these graphs as it has frame generation enabled to give the perception of a really high frame rate though unless you've already got a solid frame rate around 90 FPS with it turned off we don't recommend enabling it as we found the latency penalty is just too high for gaming on average at 1440p the arc gpus are a solid recommendation especially for their price and if you're happy to drop down to the medium or high presets from the Ultras and extremes that we've tested here today you'll see solid games across the board then at 1080p the RX 6600 is definitely more tempting as it's placed comfortably between the two Intel gpus and is price just between them two if you've learned nothing from this video so far at least remember this the RTX 3050 should not be on your radar for a good budget GPU as far as cost per frame is concerned the arc gpus Dominate and the a580 tops the chance for both 1440p and 1080p something we weren't able to say when they first released especially the a750 which was released in OCT October 2022 we'll quickly touch on power consumption but it's what we would expect as marus pointed out earlier in the video The Arc gpus aren't exactly sipping power and they get comfortably outperformed by the RX 6600 and RTX 460 if you're weighing up between Arc and AMD gpus it's hard to say which is the right choice for you personally I'd still opt for an RX 6600 for its more reliable drivers and better integration with games as well as the fact it uses significantly less power than the AR a580 as electricity is horribly expensive in the UK right now I'll hand you back to markers for our final thoughts well well well then everybody wasn't that interesting and it's nice to know that the story has changed from sort of when Arc first came out as we've seen it's not perfect if you're going to have outliers like Starfield they are going to hamper your experience but as long as I think you do your research and you're aware that this is a potential issue then I am actually going to recommend Arc believe it or not because if you can buy it for the right price and emphasis on the right price then you can barag yourself a real bargain especially bear in mind that there just aren't really any good gpus you can buy for around about the price of the a580 I mean obviously if you do want to maximize bang for buck then you should be looking at a used GPU but a lot of people want new they want the warranty they want the Peace of Mind of knowing it's hopefully anyway going to work for a very long time it's good to see that we've had the stability on the H as well Starfield aside drivers installed without any issues recordings work well av1 support is great especially at this price point but it's not going to be for everybody because the 6600 and all of the older cars actually from AMD can be found for the same sort of price as you find the arc gpus and there lies the problem I think you're going to have to specifically get one of these arc gpus on sale for it to really be worth it or maybe there's like a particular game that you play that Arc just performs really well in I mean something like returnal right I mean it's really good to see that it does run well but it is going to be on a bit of a game by game basis so I would say it's a cautious recommendation but actually specifically with the a580 a recommendation nonetheless let me know your thoughts on this though what did you make of Arc do you agree with me that it's still a little bit hit and this or does this not bother you and again if you're playing a specific game you're happy to take the hit as long as the game of your choice performs really well I'd love to hear from you so let us know your thoughts smash the like button if you've enjoyed this get yourself subscribed and of course if you do want to check out current pricing on anything featured in this video you can find it listed down below with our affiliate and while you're down there why not check out the awesome AOS g6x this 2024 gaming Beast packs a 16in 165 HZ display with Dolby vision and a pin sharp resolution of 2560 x600 factoring the latest 14th gen Intel CPUs nvidia's 40 series of mobile graphics and gigabyte windforce Infinity fans and you've got the gaming laptop of your dreams it even comes with gigabyt AI Nexus software for better performance Acoustics and Battery l learn more today with the link down below thank you so much for watching this video we'll catch you in the next [Music] one

Channel: PC Centric

Views: 43,312

Keywords: pccentric, gaming, pc gaming, gaming computer, pc centric, pc build, gaming pc, budget gaming pc, cheap gaming pc, budget pc, budget pc build, pc build 2024, intel arc, arc 580, arc a750, a580 graphics card, graphics card, is arc worth it, arc graphics card, rx 6600, amd, intel, rx6600, 6600 graphics card, a580 gameplay, a580 benchmark

Id: Z6CKeB02trI

Length: 24min 14sec (1454 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2024