Intel GPUs Are Here! ARC A770 & A750 Review & Benchmarks

foreign [Music] books today I am finally able to show you intol's long-awaited arc graphics cards feels like we've been talking about these upcoming Intel gpus for years now and maybe we have been a little over a year ago now Tim covered Intel's architecture Day 2021 where Intel detailed their Arc Alchemist gpus along with xcss AI based upscaling this was incredibly exciting stuff at the time due to an industry-wide shortage of graphics cards thanks to Mining and back then people were spending big money on old outdated second-hand graphics cards so a new product from Intel would have been very welcomed sadly though Intel missed that incredible window of opportunity by about a year as today marks the introduction of the arc a750 and a770 graphics cards yeah there are two versions of the a770 the standard 8 gigabyte model and then a more premium 16 gigabyte model Which Intel calls The Limited Edition version but it's no way limited so not sure about that anyway the a770 limited edition that we have on hand for testing comes in at an MSRP of 350 while the standard 8 gigabyte model costs three hundred and thirty dollars then there's the slightly cut down a750 which costs 290 dollars the a770 features 32 XE cores 32 Ray tracing units and operating frequency of 2.1 gigahertz and a 225 watt power rating now the 16 gigabyte version enjoys a memory bandwidth of up to 560 gigabytes per second while the cheaper 8 gigabyte version not only has half as much vram but the bandwidth has also been cut down by nine percent opposed to 17 and a half gigabits per second gddr6 memory on the 16 gigabyte model as it uses 16 gigabits per second gddr6 memory opposed to 17.5 gigabits per second gddr6 then we have the a750 which when compared to the a770 has 13 fewer cores and Road tracing units at 28. 50 megahertz shaved off the operating frequency and then the same 8 gigabytes of vram as the 8 gigabyte version the a770 with the same 512 gigabytes per second memory bandwidth and a total board power rating of 225 Watts I should also note that all models feature a 256-bit wide memory bus PCI Express 4.0 times 16 support and require an 8 Pin plus a 6 pin power input so those are the key specifications and for this review I'll be using the Intel reference cards for both the a770 and a750 and I'll check out some stuff like cooling performance a little bit later on Intel's Arc Alchemist gpus also offer a number of Hardware accelerated media features covering media trans code hyperin code Hardware accelerated av1 encode and air acceleration delivered by Intel xmx however we don't normally cover productivity performance or encoding slash decoding benchmarks in our gaming Focus reviews and this review will be no exception but apart from the fact that we don't normally cover this stuff we're extremely pressed for time right now coming off the back of these N4 testing with much more to do there and of course next week we have the RTX 4090 I also might be testing Intel's xcess technology but this is a feature we do plan to cover in great detail soon similar to the situation we saw at dlss these upscaling Technologies require a great deal of scrutiny and Tim will do just that in a separate content piece soon so make sure you subscribe for that now for testing all gpus have been tested at the official clock specifications so no Factory overclocking here the CPU used is the ryzen 7 5800x3d with 32 gigabytes of dual rank dual Channel ddr4 3200cl14 memory on the Asus Rog Crosshair 8 extreme motherboard and in total I've tested 12 games at 1080P and 1440p so let's go over the data first up we have Rainbow Six extraction this was the only game to have an issue in my testing the game didn't crash but the menus had a strange artifacting bug Which Intel says they're aware of and it will be fixed in a future driver update so perhaps a non-issue moving forward the game itself appeared to play well and performance overall was excellent at 1080p the a750 was faster than both the 6650 and RTX 3060 while the a770 was 14 faster than the 6650 XT so that's an impressive result and a good win for Intel quite incredibly that margin blows out to 24 at 1440p is the a770 managed 117 FPS and the a750 108 FPS in fact the a770 wasn't that much slower than the 6700 XT so very impressive stuff here indeed the F1 2021 results were also very impressive here the a770 was 15 faster than the 6650 XT at 1080P and just 10 slower than the 6700 XC it also blew the RTX 3060 out of the water to come in just nine percent slower than the 3060 TI and the a750 also did really well just edging out the 6650 XT and RTX 3060 jumping up to 1440p so the a770 lead the 6650 XT by a massive 21 margin pumping at 76 fps to just 63 FPS for the Radeon GPU and that's with Ray tracing enabled the a750 was also strong here beating the RTX 3060 by a 9 margin so another very solid result here for Intel unfortunately though things do go a bit skew with for The Arc gpus in Horizon zero Dawn at 1080p the a770 came in behind even the RX 6600 making it 19 slower than the 6650 XT and eight percent slower than the RTX 3060 so given what we've seen so far that is a very disappointing result increasing the resolution to 1440p does help out a bit and now the a770 can be seen basically matching the RTX 3060 but it's still eight percent slower than the 6650 XT meanwhile the a750 is only delivering 6600 light performance so not a good title for Arc it's a similar story in watchdog's Legion though performance is very good compared to Nvidia but less impressive compared to AMD the a770 for example was 13 faster than the RTX 3060 but a massive 16 slower than the 6650 XT basically the a750 was only able to match the cheaper RX 6600 so that's a pretty brutal outcome for Intel however increasing the resolution to 1440p drastically changes the picture here and now the a770 is actually able to match the 6650 XT with 76 FPS on average the a750 also jumped up to the 6600 XT with 70 FPS and both gpus were much faster than the RTX 3060 so it would seem that these Arc gpus do prefer the 1440p resolution opposed to 1080p at least from a competitive standpoint shadow of the turmeric is an older DirectX 12 title and it's not one that Arc is well optimized for falling short of 100 FPS on average at 1080p with just 92 FPS the a770 was only able to match the RX 6600 making it 18 slower than the 6650 X10 10 slower than the RTX 3060. once again though those margins do close up at 1440p and now the a770 was just seven percent slower than the 6650 XT while the a750 was eight percent faster than the RX 6600 moving on we see that Hitman 3 is a brutal title for the arc gpus at 1080p as here both were quite a bit slower than the RTX 3060 a mile slower than the 6650 XT again though 1440p does help improve the a770 and a750 standings pushing both ahead of the RX 6600 now the a770 was 10 slower than the 6650 XT so still quite a bad outcome given the price but much better than the situation seen at 1080p Far Cry 6 is really another poor title for the arc gpus depending on what you compare them to and you can see why Intel went with the RTX 3060 because here the a770 was just three percent slower but when compared to the 6650 XT it was a whopping 25 slower and 12 slower than the much cheaper RX 6600 upping the resolution of 1440p did get the a770 alongside the RX 6600 but still it was 18 slower than the 6650 XT so not a good result relative to the Radeon gpus next we have cyberpunk 2077 and again the 1080p results aren't pretty with the a770 coming in behind the RX 6600 to make it 20 slower than the 6650 XT oddly both the a717 a750 delivered virtually the same performance here so it does appear to be some kind of bottleneck either caused by The Alchemist architecture or perhaps it's just a driver issue it's an odd one though because increasing the resolution to 1440p only reduced performance of the a770 by 15 meanwhile the 6650 XT saw a more typical 42 drop and the RTX 3060 a 40 drop the good news being that at 1440p both the a717 a750 were faster than the 6650 XT and in fact work much slower than the RTX 3060 ti so that's a tremendous result and very surprising given What was seen at 1080p the Dying Light 2 results are much more competitive at 1080p the a770 edged out the 6650xt to deliver 3060 TI light performance and the a750 also managed to match the 6650 XT and crushed the RTX 3060 then at 1440p the arc gpus look very impressive and the a770 isn't that far off the RTX 3070 all said and done it was 16 fast and the 6650 XT while the a750 was seven percent faster so certainly impressive stuff here moving on to Halo infinite The Arc gpus can again be found delivering pretty sub-optimal performance at 1080p as both were slow on the RX 6600 and just 16 faster than the RTX 3050 and while I know 16 is quite a sizeable margin When comparing any GPU with the RTX 3050 16 is not really a sizeable margin sadly even at 1440p the arc gpus are massively underwhelming Halo infinite trailing not just the RTX 3060 but also the 6650 XT and by quite some margin as well now if you recall when I first benchmarked Spider-Man remastered with a boatload of gpus I did include the A380 and the results were pretty horrible in fact they were very horrible shortly after that video Intel addressed their performance issues with a new driver but I wasn't going to revisit that content just for the A380 anyway performance with the current driver is mighty impressive as we see here with the a77 and a750 both of which crushed the RTX 3060 and 6650 XT at 1080p the 1440p data was also very impressive here the a770 was just seven percent slower than the 3060 TI and almost 30 faster than the 6650 XT so amazing performance here I just wish we saw more of it and here's the most disappointing result and one of the biggest issues with The Arc Alchemist architecture support for older games Counter-Strike Global Offensive might be super old and it might only use DirectX 9 but it's by Far and Away the most played game on Steam with peaks of a million players daily so more than twice that of Apex Legends for example and that's a huge problem for Intel because as you can see here the performance is nowhere with the a770 and a750 and in case you're wondering yeah these results are accurate and even at 1440 pits still a complete mess the game is technically very playable but certainly not in a competitive setting and you'd obviously just buy a GeForce or Radeon GPU if you played CS go or other old games and the power consumption is really not anything you get excited about either but it's far from a disaster you're looking at similar power usage to that of the much faster rated RX 6800 for the a770 as it bumped up consumption by 23 over the 6650 XT the a750 was really no better so in terms of power efficiency and performance per watt Arc is kinda bad but it's certainly not a deal breaker okay time for cooling performance and I'm just going to skim over this section the Intel reference cards worked well they certainly look simple but nice enough and the build quality is good though they are a bit of a pain to take apart anyway the a750 ran at a core temperature of 67 degrees with the memory at 70 degrees so both are very acceptable especially given the 1500 RPM fan speed which resulted in near silent operation as you can see the GPU clocked at 2.4 gigahertz and the memory ran at the advertised 16 gigabits per second then we have the a770 which run its cores and memory at 70 degrees with a fan speed of 1600 RPM so again it was very quiet given the GPU is sucking down just 155 Watts on average it's really not that hard to cool especially by today's standards now looking at the 12 game average it's pretty hard to get excited about these new Intel art graphics cards the a770 only managed to match the RX 6600 with 102 FPS on average while the a750 was a whisker slower with 97 FPS the 1440p results are more compelling but even so the a770 falling behind the 6650 XT is a rough deal from Intel and although it looks good sitting next to the RTX 3060 the GeForce GPU really was already a terrible deal next to the 6650 XT so really AMD has made life difficult here for Intel and there's really no better way to illustrate that point than to look at a simple cost per frame graph and we'll start with the 1080p data in terms of price to Performance the a750 is only able to match the 6600 XT while the a770 does beat out the already bad value RTX 3060 and 3060 TI but can only match the RX 6800 which is 60 faster really both should be compared to the 6650 XT and when doing so you learn that the a750 costs 15 more per frame and the a770 well it's 37 more costly per frame yeah anyway 1440p and here things look a lot better for Intel But ultimately really still not good enough the 6650xt Matched the cost per frame of the RX 6600 and that meant the a750 was three percent more costly per frame and the a770 21 more costly even the 8 gigabyte version of the a770 will come out more expensive per frame than the a750 so in short Intel can't match the 6650 XT at the current msrps there's really not much more to say the cost per frame graph really nailed it like now the a770 to the point where it really is quite sadly Dead on Arrival that seems a bit harsh to say as in quite a few of the instances the performance was really quite impressive given the price but sadly there were a number of instances where it was anywhere from underwhelming to downright terrible at the end of the day you can't even begin to entertain the idea of paying a premium for the a770 or a750 over established Radeon gpus look if the RTX 3060 was as good as it gotten the sub 400 US market then the a770 or a750 might be worth a shot but unfortunately for Intel AMD has managed to undercut in video by quite a substantial margin making the GeForce gpus largely Irrelevant in the sub 400 Market and out of Interest we asked on Twitter how much cheaper these Arc gpus would need to be in order for you to purchase one over an AMD or Nvidia graphics card the general consensus was that Intel needed to come in at least 20 cheaper so with the 6650 XT easily available for 300 us that means the a770 would have to cost no more than 240 U.S for the majority of you to go for it and that's a discount of a little over 30 percent so that's probably never going to happen as Intel would likely be selling them at a significant loss unfortunately for Intel though that is the reality of the situation the a770 needs to cost 240 and the a750 220 anything more than that and you might as well buy from the established brands and granted we're yet to properly investigate stuff like xcss but of course Nvidia has dlss and AMD offers FSR so there's no chance Intel's upscaling technology makes the arc gpus a must-have item I also haven't really had a time to check out the ray tracing performance beyond what we saw in F1 2021 and that's certainly something to explore with future content that said I strongly believe for the most part Ray tracing at this performance tier is largely irrelevant as you have to compromise too heavily on other visual quality settings in order to achieve a 60 FPS minimum at low resolution such as 1080P and I have the same opinion of the 6650 XT and RTX 3060. overall the a770 and a750 genuinely impressed me on numerous occasions during my testing and there's certainly real potential for Intel to become a genuine third competitor in the GPU space it's just not going to happen with Alchemist and realistically that was never going to be possible so unless Intel Canon is willing to slash prices I can't recommend you take the Gamble on either the a770 or a750 you really are just better off buying the 6650 XT that's simply all there is to it so with that I'm going to end the video here if you liked it you know what to do subscribe also we have float plan and patreon if you'd like more Hardware unboxed goodness you can get stuff like well access to our exclusive Discord server to myself to a live stream which I guess is also exclusive a lot of exclusive stuff over there uh q and A's behind the scenes content a lot of cool stuff so if you're interested check it out but if not that is perfectly fine and I would like to thank you for watching this video I'm your host Dave and I'll see you again next time [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Hardware Unboxed

Views: 120,550

Keywords: hardware unboxed

Id: XTomqXuYK4s

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 05 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/-TheGreaterWill-]

As expected enthusiast stuff who wants new toy to mess around with and is willing to deal with iffy drivers and and lack of optimization for majority of titles.

You can see it has the capable hardware (like in Spider-man), but without good software and per game optimizations it's mostly irrelevant, sadly. I just hope Intel doesn't give up, because we desperately need 3rd player. We already saw glimpse of a shitshow with Nvidia's Ada announce and completely absurd pricing, and I bet RDNA3 won't be far behind in pricing scheme.

[u/FBIKinGTaP]

yeah looks like not 1 day buy, and need more software maturity

[u/Anxious-Dare]

It's interesting to see given intel's pledge to price it according to the performance it'd deliver, and considering 770 versus the 6650xt is available at $350 (just about, with one entry), but it generally walks all over the 3050 at the same price point

[u/Thing_On_Your_Shelf]

Both are two pretty specific scenarios, but it does looks like there are legitimately 2 groups of people who might actually want to buy these cards

1. PC part enthusiasts or the like who just some unique hardware to play around with

2. Someone who is knowledgeable enough to know the limitations and how to troubleshoot the issues, is on somewhat of a budget, only plays newer DX13 games, and is interested in the RT, XESS, and AV1 features

On another note, I really love the look of these cards. Super simple, clean, and pleasing to look at. Kinda reminds me of the EVGA GTX 900 series or XFX r9 200 series.

[u/aimlessdrivel]

These cards doing better at higher resolution and with RT enabled is kinda...opposite what they're needed for. I doubt people will buy a high end Intel GPU for several years, what they want is a cheap alternative for their older midrange build or prebuilt.

[u/Triger_CZ]

I'm curious about RT performance

[u/HarleyQuinn_RS]

Very disappointing result overall, but they are also very strange and difficult to quantify. The 770 often loses to even the 6600XT and RTX3060, even in DX12 titles. But it scales better with higher resolutions and may end up beating them at 4K. The 6650XT slaps the 770 16GB all over the place and at a similar price point (or cheaper). It's no wonder Intel avoided these comparisons. The 750 fares a little better, but again better cards exist, which are cheaper or cost around the same and don't come with a slue of other issues. Not in this review, but RT performance is better than equivalent GPUs. Overall, this is unfortunate for consumers. I don't think the market is going to be disrupted at all. The 770 is practically DOA and the 750 is only just barely relevant in its price bracket (ignoring everything but price-to-performance). Hopefully they do better next time, or slash their prices and fix their drivers. Performing so poorly in non-DX12/Vulkan titles, really hurts.

Gamer's Nexus goes into more of the nitty gritty beyond benchmarks, pointing out that the fans never stop spinning when idle, lots of driver issues, no support for things like Afterburner, some games will just crash or be buggy, issues with Arc Control, buggy 'added value' software like smooth sync etc...

[u/your_mind_aches]

Intel...

Still, really really hoping they continue on with ARC and keep on working on it until it's competitive. I want there so badly to be a third player in the space.

[u/kirk7899]

If the drivers get better over time then it would be good.