The Great Blue Hope | Intel Arc A770 16GB

one Corporation alone and without competition is a tyrant dominating the market like a bond villain two companies keep each other in check undercutting and outperforming one another to drive progress forwards and prices down however before long two rival companies will often arrive at equilibrium a kind of Silent agreement not to rock the boat too hard and keep the whole Enterprise profitable for everyone except consumers of course because us right well that sure feels like what's happened in the PC markets graphics cards have been dominated by red and green for so long their colors have started to run in 2022 however A New Hope appeared and its color is blue in the two years plus that I've been active on YouTube I haven't spoken much about Intel's discrete gpus this is in part because I only review stuff I can afford to buy and as intriguing as the arc series of gpus have been over the last year or so I haven't quite been prepared to sync a few hundred on one just to satisfy my curiosity well thankfully my friends over at Hardware lab aren't afraid of a living dangerously and have lent me their Arc Alchemist a770 limited edition to review I'll admit my curiosity was a morbid one I didn't expect Intel to genuinely compete in performance with their first product and their arrival almost smelt of a big company expecting to dominate a new market from Jump Street Apple's first iPhone rocketed them into a prominent position in the mobile phone industry even if it did take a couple of iterations to get the product just right on the other hand when Sony started making interchangeable lens cameras in the 2000s reviewers and consumers almost Shrugged them out of the markets Intel didn't need to innovate with Arc it doesn't do anything other graphics cards didn't already do its main appeal in 2022 was simply that it existed at a time where gpus were in short supply over a year on Intel have passed some of their early teething troubles and the consensus appears to be that Arc is now safe to buy with a 16 gigabyte frame buffer and a 400 pound asking price in the UK and even lower in the US it presents an appealing Prospect as a time where games are getting demanding especially for vram to get a feel for how this card performs I've installed it on my moderately priced gaming PC using a ryzen 5 5600x and 32 gigs of RAM the CPU has the potential to be a bottleneck with this tier of graphics card so I don't expect to be doing much if any testing at 1920x1080 [Music] um well I might have spoken too soon if if any game was going to shoot down my 1440p premise out of the gate it was bound to be the last of us the high preset has no issues with vram but the frame rate isn't particularly impressive you could expect a reasonably constant 30 FPS with an average just short of 40 but 60 doesn't seem to be on the cards dropping to medium while retaining Ultra textures adds about 10 percent of the average and slightly more to the one percent lows pretty playable sure but disappointing compared to even the RX 6700 [Music] on reflection if my rhetorical goal was to convince you that the arc a770 is a 1440 card maybe I shouldn't have followed up with Jedi Survivor all right my bad raw 1440 is pretty rough going at the high preset you could potentially get us pretty solid 30 FPS lock as my Benchmark runs through an average of 42 and lows of 34. adding balanced FSR brings the average up to a more tolerable 63 without impacting image quality too much and possibly even improving it however there's a bug in Survivor that respawn of yet to fix where ambient occlusion on cow's hair vanishes when he starts moving causing it to turn a rather unfortunate shade of Orange until it gets an official fix the temporary solution comes in the form of Ray tracing alas it's an expensive solution as the full 1440 High frame rate drops from 42 to 32 and the one percent starts to look cinematic in a bad way adding balanced FSR helps and again could provide a lot to 30 FPS if you were inclined to with averages of 48 as it stands this actually puts the a770s slightly behind the GTX 1080 TI including rage racing though of course it doesn't have to deal with that card's glitchy noise reduction I'd love to have tested The Arc in 1080P as I did with the old Pascal card alas another bug prevented me from changing resolution way to go guys [Music] flipping the script somewhat Resident Evil 4's performance is shockingly good on the a770 matching or beating the RX 6700 at every tested preset and allowing for higher texture settings in the process 1440 prioritize Graphics manages almost 89 FPS with maxed out 8 gig textures turning to the ray tracing preset could potentially still be done at eight gigabytes but to avoid any of the issues the game warns about I dropped to six gigabytes this only sends averages down to 80 FPS and one percent lows are still above 60. the max preset restores Leon's luscious locks along with rt and all the other bells and whistles once more I kept textures at six gigabytes and averages hover around 60 as a result with 1 lows of 50. [Music] Fusion around Forza Horizon 5 not at all helped by my confusion about Forza Horizon 5. I've been aware since late last year that playground games had added in-game raytraced Reflections to the ultra and extreme modes for much of that time I'd assume that the quality presets included the appropriate level of RT when in fact they just added the previous kind the one that only works in your garage or in photo mode it turns out that even at the ultra and extreme presets you still have to manually enable the ultra or extreme RT modes with that in mind then at 1440 Ultra without in-game RT the a770 can push 77.6 FPS on average with 68.91 lows just a couple frames behind the rx6700 there is room to turn up to Xtreme if you really want to averages now dip below 70 and minimums are still above 60. on the other hand if you have yourself a particularly shiny set of cars in your collection 1440 Ultra only loses 5 frames by adding Ultra RT averaging 72.7 now your car can reflect other parts of your car cool eh [Music] I've told this story a couple of times now but to iterate I used to Benchmark Halo infinite in the campaign during a quite demanding outdoor section however I had a few issues with the Xbox game pass launcher so I switched over to the steam version which is free to play now I do an average of a couple of big Team battles which are roughly as demanding as the campaign at 1440 High the a770 performs decently well keeping minimums above 60 FPS and averaging 76. this is within a couple of frames of the RX 6700 and GTX 1080 TI at the same settings for those who prefer smaller scale games an average of three team Slayer matches came to 86 FPS with one percent lows of 74. again on par with the 1080 TI [Music] in a vacuum the a770s performance in a play Tower Requiem isn't all that impressive at 1440 medium with ultra resolution Optimizer it falls just short of a 60fps average and lows dropping to the 40s however a lack of context robs the Arc of some Glory compared to the RX 6700 is actually a small victory for the a770 okay it's not even a 2fps difference we'll we'll call it a very small victory over the Radeon returning to the Sony titles and the a770 is a little less satisfying in God of War it falls a couple of frames short of these 60 average losing to the RX 6700 and even the GTX 1080 TI it wouldn't take a lot of effort to get over the 60 Mark dropping to medium should probably be sufficient and preferable to using FSR which still looks a bit off in this title [Music] so I've come across this issue several times in the course of making other videos and it's a bit of a shock to see it here while swinging through Manhattan in Spider-Man remastered The Game Stops for a moment to load up textures and assets before carrying on once it's done so far I've seen it on Old SLI and Crossfire GPU setups and I've seen it on an RTX 3070 that was being tested with a Pentium from 2014. I didn't expect to see it here and certainly not during two separate non-rt runs and two RT runs I'm hoping this is something to do with my setup and not something other people will experience but it's possibly something that Intel's very active driver development team might yet need to work on that aside the game seems to average 96 FPS at 1440 very high and can even manage a greater than 70 FPS average when RT Reflections are enabled but you can't really trust those figures and I can't genuinely recommend this right now [Music] thank you [Music] Uncharted 4 proves less of a problem and it still looks okay perhaps not as good as one might like and never quite as good as the cutscenes but I think you'll still want to use the ultra quality preset the good news is the a770 has enough horsepower to deliver 75 FPS at 1440. the less good news is that one percent lows dropped slightly below 60 which you can either deal with or attempt to fix with a 60 FPS cap and maybe some select settings reductions thank you I don't know if Intel's devs specifically targeted cyberpunk 2077 without optimization but it's performing really quite well here at 1440 Ultra the game runs at almost 50 FPS with lows of about 36. now you could obviously drop to high and get close to 60 maybe even pass it at medium but my point of comparison here is the RTX 3070 a card which still sells for substantially more than the a770 in most markets and which is only 8 FPS faster here the margin is a little wider with rt enabled the RT medium preset feels pretty close to no RT at all but also looks like no RT at all and RT Ultra only runs at below 20 FPS about 20 less than the 3070 still cyberpunk performance is a big win over the RX 6700 across the board and a huge win over the old GTX 1080 TI [Music] weren't enough the a770 plays a flipping Blinder in The Witcher 3. at 1440 Ultra it's 86.8 FPS average is less than 3 FPS behind the RTX 3070 and it's one percent loser more than 10 above those of the 8 gigabyte GeForce is RT going to ruin the party like the Nvidia the a770s performance in RT Ultra is a barely playable 26 FPS but you can always add some FSR to bring those numbers up more to the point the RX 6700 can only manage to hit the exact same average by using the RT performance preset [Music] fortnite made for an interesting comparison to the RX 6700 at 1440 low with epic view distance the game averaged 204 FPS within margin of error of the radeons 208 minimums were better on the AMD by about 15 but the a770 was nothing to sneeze at with almost 140 FPS 1 lows turning up the medium still maintains a pretty acceptable High refresh experience with the average close to 144 and lows still over a hundred the Epic preset with Hardware Ray tracing isn't a great idea for a multiplayer shooter even with TSR low upscaling at quality the game still can't even reach a 40 FPS average and one percent lows are below 30. [Music] foreign I suspect something weird's going on in war zone 2 whether at 1440 extreme Ultra or balanced or with upscaling enabled the average FPS registered somewhere in the mid 60s to low 70s this doesn't appear to be any kind of bottleneck the CPU is a long way from tapping out and the GPU is always at or close to 100 utilization so all I can think of is that maybe there's a driver problem waiting to be resolved I'm happy to blame the 34 FPS one percenters for why I suck so much of this game if you are happy to believe my filthy lies performance wise this is a good 10 to 15 short of the old RX 5700 XT and way short of the 100 plus FPS the RX 6700 is capable of as ultra settings so if you're heavily into war zone this might not be the GPU for you [Music] regulars may know that I steer clear of including GTA 5 unless I have a good reason to I know it's a good game I know it's popular but I feel bad about having a 2020 release on my roster and I'm very conflicted about Witcher 3. however there aren't a million videos about how GTA 5 runs on the a770 yet unlike every other graphics card under the Sun so I thought I'd use this as an excuse for a bit of a rampage through San Andreas GTA can still be demanding of course and on the other hand you also don't want to let it get too fast above a certain frame rate the engine will struggle to keep up and you'll get huge stutters regardless of your Hardware so I cranked up the advanced settings and turned the resolution to 1440 using FXAA as msaa turned out to be a step too far and saw a quite excellent swasan Nerf FPS on average foreign ly I know there's not a lot of love among youth for spoken and I'll admit the alleged banter between the protagonist and her sentient jewelry does make me want to turn the sound off and the quality of the in-game graphics do not in any way match the system requirements but I already had the demo installed and I'm sure someone out there might want to know how the arc performs well it's not great the Intel devs probably took reviews to heart and gave this one a pass so the average at 1440 standard quality is a pretty uninspiring 59 FPS 10 short of the RX 6700 and the RTX 3070 with the latter being able to achieve those frames at mostly High settings foreign [Music] [Music] Alchemist a770 16 gigabyte model is nowhere near as hard to recommend as I suspected it might be there are still wrinkles in the experience I loaded up the in-game overlay because for now the Intel doesn't seem to interface with MSI afterburner but more than a handful of metrics and the issue of freezing in Spider-Man was pretty disappointing to see in a big game but on the whole this was a far more polished experience than I'd expected for our first effort I have to say Bravo Intel you've done well for yourselves can I recommend it well I'm typically one to suggest the used Market over new in most situations and while the a770 does appear to be pretty competitive at U.S prices the UK price is still a little too high to earn an unqualified recommendation you can get an RX 6700xc or 6750xt that less than the 16 gig Arc right now and given how the regular 6700 Compares I'd expect those cars to be extremely compelling alternatives that being said neither of those cards have 16 gigs of vram and Intel's RT performance is looking quite strong so which you should buy probably depends on where your priorities lie thanks for watching kindly do the usual YouTube things if you feel so inclined and I'll see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: Iceberg Tech

Views: 99,431

Keywords: iceberg, A770 16GB in 2023, A770 16GB vs 2023, A770 16GB still good, is A770 16GB worth it, A770 16GB resident evil 4, A770 16GB plague tale requiem, A770 16GB spider-man remastered, A770 16GB forza horizon 5, A770 halo infinite, A770 uncharted, A770 16GB god of war, A770 cyberpunk, witcher 3 remastered, A770 16GB the last of us, A770 jedi survivor, A770 fortnite, A770 warzone 2, A770 16GB, A770 16GB ray tracing, a770 16gb GTA V, A770 Forspoken

Id: b4RPVNhUwSg

Length: 18min 19sec (1099 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2023