Please Buy Intel GPUs. - Arc A750 & A770 Review

allow me to put on my shill hat for a moment everyone else is going to tell you what's wrong with Intel's Arc A700 gpus and we're gonna need to talk about that too because it's a pretty sizable list I mean he's got the a770 losing to a card from almost 10 years ago in CS go how embarrassing but what's this it beats nvidia's 3060 in fortnite it absolutely murders the Radeon 6600 in Ray traced games and is available starting at just around its 289 dollar MSRP something I will never take for granted again so it's with that in mind that I want to explore a different perspective one where the benefits of competition May outweigh the risk of buying into a first generation product that's right it is time to get blue pilled with me folks or not that one I meant like Intel blue though I am pretty excited right now excited to tell you about our sponsor ridge ridge wallet has redefined the traditional wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates because the Bulge in your pants shouldn't be from your wallet use offer code Linus to save 10 and get free worldwide shipping [Music] Intel's a750 and a770 gpus are designed for gaming at either 1440p with medium details or 1080p Ultra and they've got nvidia's RTX 3060 directly in their crosshairs or at least now they do their transistor count and power consumption are both more comparable to the RTX 3070 which would indicate that Intel fell well short of their original performance targets and is now trying to make lemonade out of these lemons but that's not our problem and from a consumer standpoint they kind of did because at 289 dollars the a750 may just be the most silicon per dollar ever in a GPU and there are situations where it really shows check out this performance in DirectX 12 games 1080p High has nvidia's 3060 taking nearly every game by a thin margin but when the resolution gets cranked to 1440p at Mid medium details it's Intel racking up small wins nearly across the board and this is against a card that costs 50 to 100 dollars more even looking closer The Arc cards continue to impress five and one percent lows are very comparable to the RTX 3060 which means you won't feel any extra hitching or stuttering in heavy fire fights and while I was concerned that Arc might fall flat on its face in a ryzen system that wasn't the case at all oh and as an extra bonus Ark murders the more price comparable RTX 3050 isn't competition great this is the point in the video where Intel's employees and shareholders might want to stop watching because we're about to look at some games that aren't DirectX 12 or Vulcan in Shadow of the Tomb Raider arc's performance Falls to nearly half in DirectX 11. ouch and CS go a DirectX 9 title where Arc feels like a totally different card every time you start it up with the a750 beating the a770 sometimes 1440p results being higher than 1080p results and oh by the way no matter which card you're looking at they get absolutely wrecked in performance by the 3050 a flagship GPU from nine years ago and probably a competitive Abacus user I mean what happened to crush Intel's performance in these older titles well in a nutshell Arc isn't actually running DirectX 9 games in DirectX 9. instead they're using a DirectX 9 to DirectX 12 translation layer this works because you can turn basically any dx9 command into a string of dx12 commands which is great for compatibility but in the process you are adding a butt load of CPU overhead so much that any small background task can significantly affect your frame rates now because of the extremely limited time that we were given to Benchmark Arc before the Embargo lift we weren't able to test a wide variety of older games this is actually a strategy that we've seen often when a manufacturer doesn't want you to look too closely fortunately we have a solution to that tomorrow we are going to be live for hours taking requests from our community and gaming side by side on the arc a770 and RTX 3060 so you can see how your favorite games run or if they run at all because nothing at this point is a guarantee Intel told us Point Blank that they knew about the Performance challenges of Arc in older games and they had a strategy where they were going to price this generation of cards according to Hollywood perform in a worst case scenario or or in tier 3 games and I'm not going to go as far as to say that Intel lied which would imply a premeditated intention to deceive but what I do have to say is that these CS go results show that they did not follow through on this I mean charitably we could say that the arc gets half of the performance of an RTX 3060 though at 1080p it's more like a third so even if we're looking at a 400 RTX 3060 these A700 series gpus should be at most 200 bucks but if we go back to that die size conversation I mean remember this is a GPU that is larger than a 3070 and built on tsmc's Cutting Edge and sixth node rather than in Intel's own Fab so they can't exactly give themselves a friends and neighbors discount on the fabbing so if they went any lower they'd likely be losing money on every card they sold and it gets even worse unfortunately for Intel who's trying to position themselves as the scrappy Underdog undercutting nvidia's monopolistic pricing we already have Scrappy Underdog at home it's AMD and their Radeon 6600 goes for about 250 bucks and is able to truly trade blows with the RTX 3060 without the in specific DirectX 12 titles fine print and although amd's software hasn't always been fantastic if our community feedback is anything to go by the last couple of years have been a real turning point and there are DNA 2 cards have aged like fine wine getting better with each new driver update I would hope that the same will happen for Arc and we actually have seen a lot of improvement since its first outing Arc was actually impressively stable for a first gen product throughout our testing but when it comes to Raw performance there are clearly some problems here that can't be fixed without new silicon lichen tells Reliance on resizable bar rebar as we've started calling it is a feature that allows for much larger more efficient data dumps between the GPU and the system memory it's only available on systems from the last few years but for most people that's not really a huge deal because performance on AMD and Nvidia cards only improves by anywhere from one to at most about 10 percent for Intel on the other hand rebar is basically a necessity performance can end up so bad without it that Intel said in their own press briefing that if you don't have it you might as well get a 3060. with this in mind then we point blank asked Intel why the heck would anybody buy an arc GPU over the RX 6600 to which they replied that the rx6600 doesn't have feature parity with the a750 when compared to Radeon 6000 Intel claimed Arc has much better Ray tracing AI acceleration and media encoders that make it a much closer competitor to the RTX 3060 and okay yeah if you care about those things they actually have a pretty good point in Ray tracing titles the a770 is a tiny bit behind the RTX 3060 and in Shadow of the Tomb Raider Intel's XE super sampling or xcss ended up performing very similarly to nvidia's dlss2 so yes Intel you do very much have a leg up on AMD in 100 of the Strand type games on the market along with the other 20 games that actually support xcss but it's clear you'll need to pull some tricks out of your sleeves to get game developers to adopt xcss more broadly that sleeve trick by the way is easy on our short circuit hoodie lttstore.com it's not just game super sampling either if you care about AI performance more generally Arc is kind of excellent and here's why traditionally Matrix operations are done using a Mac or a multiply accumulate combined which is okay at traditional workloads but can be pretty slow for AI on integrated Graphics Intel has a fancier way to math called dp4a where it takes a 32-bit register and splits it into 8-bit chunks allowing for four parallel operations to be performed at once improving throughput by about four times the full fat art cards like the a750 take that to the next level with xmx which allows you to do multiple multiply accumulates in parallel which can improve throughput by up to 16 times in theory and in practice where the a770 absolutely slaughtered the competition in topaz video enhance AI without running into any of the issues that we experienced in our a370m review Intel Arc also supports next-gen av1 encoding and decoding which is particularly beneficial for streamers due to its much higher image quality at low bit rates compared to h.264 we actually have a video coming up that discusses using a low end Arc GPU as kind of an encoding co-processor if you don't want to spend 900 on an RTX 470 excuse me sorry I mean 40 80 12 gig unfortunately in more traditional h.264 and h.265 encoding the RTX 3060 is able to handily embarrass even the top tier a770 and the same goes for blender rendering though as a consolation prize intel was at least able to beat the 3050 in blender while AMD continued to make its usual excellent case for never using AMD if you're a blender artist Intel also made a good case for not using archon Linux for the foreseeable future sorry guys I know that you had High Hopes but currently Arc only supports kernel version 6 and Intel has said that they do not plan on supporting version 5 meaning that every stable version of Linux is currently not supported to put this in perspective for the non-linux folks out there this is basically like Intel launching a product but only having drivers for Windows 12. oh one thing I haven't mentioned yet is that there are both 16 gig and 8 gig versions of the a770 but the reason I didn't mention that is that Intel's only doing a small run of 16 gig cards and the a750 is the far more compelling option anyway at 289 dollars for nearly the same performance now thank you for that I'm going to do something that might surprise you I'm going to ask you you find viewer of Linus Tech tips you you Savvy source of tech support for your friends and family to seriously consider Arc for your next GPU because somebody needs to do it and it can't be your friend who's shopping for pre-builds right now you do not want to help them troubleshoot random edge cases on this thing but but somebody has to do it because the last few years have made it clear that Nvidia has no qualms about gouging their customers when there's a shortage or no shortage and the thing is that everyone says they want more competition but then they go ahead and just buy the Nvidia GPU and hey thanks AMD for keeping Team Green honest glad you exist except when you don't keep Team Green honest because you also like to jack up your prices and sell to crypto miners so there it is if you're the technical type and don't mind rolling the dice once in a while I'm asking you to give Intel Arc a shot you might not get as many FPS but I think it's safe to say you'll have a more interesting Hardware experience than a 3060 owner will you can even overclock the thing or you could just ignore my plea and wait for amd's rdna3 to drop so you can pick up a GPU that was designed to take on nvidia's 4000 series instead of one that failed to take on the 3070. just like I failed to segue to our sponsor next ago if you're working from home and are in need of a new webcam Mexico has a wide variety to choose from to keep you looking sharp on your conference calls whether you're on a budget and need high quality video or you just want the best possible webcam regardless of the price their selection of webcams and webcam accessories will help you look and sound your best even if you're looking for something more in the middle next to go has you covered so take your webcam setup to the next level and get a Mexico webcam using the link down below if you guys enjoyed this video you're going to want to check out our unboxing of the a770 over on the short circuit Channel we get into a little bit more depth about the different kinds of connectors on it and all that kind of good stuff show the RGB lighting up

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 3,347,138

Keywords: Intel, A770, A750, Nvidia, RTX 3060, RTX 3050, AMD, Radeon, RX 6600, #DubbedWithAloud

Id: 6T9d9LM1TwY

Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 05 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Timpa87]

I'll give LTT credit for something. I've watched 3 other reviews of the card and they're the first to remark about Intel likely falling short of its initial goal of targeting the 3070 as a competitor and how much cost there is in silicon and the hardware inside.

I think that's something to consider when you see how it performs against the 3060 level and wonder if Intel can improve enough in the next generation to actually make a more cost-efficient card otherwise they're not going to stick with this.

[u/jaaval]

The linux support bit is a bit misleading. In linux the driver that actually talks to the hardware is part of the kernel so you don't generally put new drivers in an old kernel version. New drivers are released with new kernel versions.

Which can of course be annoying when new hardware is launched but it is what it is. Intel's 12th gen iGPU didn't receive proper support until kernel 5.18 or something.

Technically there are "dynamic kernel modules" which would enable releasing a driver that is automatically recompiled for different kernel versions. Nvidia's driver installer checks the kernel version and compiles the kernel part of the driver during installation. But people didn't really like nvidia's use of this system while Intel's and AMD's open drivers were generally much more liked.

[u/TheRealBurritoJ]

Really enjoyed this review. I know it looks goofy on the surface, it does immediately present "Just buy it!", but it's actually rightly critical of all three GPU companies (doesn't that feel weird to say) and is honest about the wins and losses of Arc.

I don't know if it's the best decision to buy a suboptimal product for the possibility of benefiting the whole market in the future, but you can tell it's something Linus is genuinely empassioned by. You can also tell the NVidia bridge is scorched to a crisp, he really goes in on them here, and not without merit.

[u/Vitosi4ek]

So, essentially: "it's better in price-to-performance than a 3060 in DX12/Vulkan games, worse than a 3050 in anything else, but please actually buy it so that Nvidia has to stop price-gauging".

Yet another GPU competitor whose main purpose in the minds of gamers is to pressure Nvidia to drop their prices rather than be a compelling product on its own. Same as no one bought AMD CPUs pre-Ryzen, but everyone hoped it'd be good so Intel had to respond.

[u/PrintfReddit]

One question which has bothered me, yes it does way worse in DX9 games but its still pulling 150+ so does it really matter to anyone outside esports?

They look pretty solid, especially in RT performance which I personally care about a lot.

[u/kaustix3]

I was kinda the market for this i thought. A casual gamer with an older system that play some older games. I guess not.

[u/Raikaru]

I wonder if anyone is going to try DXVK

[u/mdchemey]

This makes for a very interesting reality where the "entry level gaming" tier of cards has Nvidia basically as a total non-competitor in price.

On the one hand, if you have a sub-$400 GPU budget and all you care about is rasterization performance across a wide variety of titles (which probably should be the case for most gamers at this budget tier), AMD is king. In terms of price points for new parts on newegg, an RX 6600 can be had for about $240-250 right now. An RTX 3050 and Arc A750 can (or will, in the arc card's case) each be had for about $285-295. An RX 6600 XT or RX 6650 XT can be had for about $300-310. An Arc A750 will run you $330. RTX 3060, RX 6700, and RX 6700 XT all are selling in the $370-390 range. But in terms of performance, 6700/6700XT are roughly on par with a 3060 Ti (which goes for $430). 6600 XT and 6650 XT are between a 3060 and 3060 Ti and above anything Intel has to offer despite costing less than a 3060 and an A770. 6600 performs roughly on par in newer games with both a 3060 and A770 while being cheaper even than a 3050 and A750.

On the other hand, it gets interesting for streamers or raytracing lovers on a budget. An A770 might not be better in games than a 6600, but add in video capture/encoding/broadcasting and it should definitely outperform any of the AMD cards in video quality with less of a performance hit. Similarly, you generally get 3060-like performance in games with RT enabled for a price that's between that of a 3050 and 3060 or only slightly less RT performance than a 3060 for the price of a 3050. A750 sort of hits a weird spot because the ways that it's better than 6600 aren't enough better to necessarily offset the way that it's worse than a 6600 (especially considering the price difference) but it's still at least a viable option.

Meanwhile, you just straight up shouldn't buy Nvidia in this price category right now. 3050 costs way more than a 6600 and almost as much as a 6650 XT while being worse in gaming, similar in ray tracing, and only maybe better in video encode (it's so much worse at raw compute that I'm not sure if the advantage given by NVENC would completely make up the difference). 3060 gets you the advantages of both an A770 and a 6600 but at a 50% price premium over a 6600. Unless you absolutely must have every current-gen feature without sacrifices that's just a bad value proposition. 3060 Ti is over the $400 threshold.

I'm not buying anything right now and if I were, my use case would have me buying AMD since I have maybe played one title that even had the option of ray tracing ever and I don't stream or otherwise make videos, but I hope people do buy Intel because there is a real argument and use case for which Intel is the clear best value.

[u/PapaBePreachin]

Honestly, I was surprised how well both cards performed across different outlet's benchmarks, particularly Spider-Man Remastered. If Intel can double down on driver optimization prior to AMD's November unveil then I'll get one for as my niece's holiday present. Like many, I've had enough of Nvidia's hostility to consumers and the market overall.

Intel is rare position to pivot themselves as mid-tier (sub $400) & budget option as all signs are pointing toward Nvidia and AMD abandoning those respectively. Combined with the Alder Lake (and likely Raptor Lake), they could really shake things up. Unfortunately, I don't have faith in Raja's leadership...