Intel Arc A770 Graphics

Product Information

The specs of the new Intel Arc series GPUs aren't half bad for the price, and bring with them some intriguing features, too. You can see this for yourself in our table below.

Each XVE can compute eight FP32 operations per cycle. That gets loosely translated into "GPU cores," though we prefer to call them "GPU shaders," and each is roughly (very roughly!) equivalent to an AMD or Nvidia shader. Each Xe-Core thus has 128 shader cores and sort of maps to an (upcoming) AMD RDNA 3 Compute Unit (CU) or an Nvidia Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) — both of which will also have 128 GPU shaders. They're all SIMD (single instruction multiple data) designs, and Arc Alchemist has enhanced the shaders to meet the full DirectX 12 Ultimate feature set. This is a similar situation to how Nvidia creates its Founders Edition graphics cards. But what's unusual about this card's launch is that we may see the majority of Intel graphics cards that hit the market being made entirely by Intel at launch. We've not heard, for certain, about any OEMs signing on to make a version of the Arc A770 or A750 at this time. Those are the launch MSRPs from October 2022, of course, and the cards have come down considerably in price in the year since their release, and you can either card for about 20% to 25% less than that. This is important, since the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD Radeon RX 7600 are very close to the 16GB Arc A770 cards in terms of current prices, and offer distinct advantages that will make potential buyers want to go with the latter rather than the former.

The Intel Arc A770 isn't the best 1440p graphics card out there, but it's better than you might think

Xe HPG microarchitecture is engineered from the ground-up to deliver high performance, efficiency, and scalability for gamers and creators. Intel Xe Super Sampling technology (XeSS) takes your gaming experience to the next level with AI-enhanced upscaling enabling more performance with high image fidelity. XeSS is optimized for Intel® Arc™ graphics products with the ability to take advantage of XMX AI hardware acceleration. Intel's Xe HPG architecture inside the Arc A770 introduces a whole other way to arrange the various co-processors that make up a GPU, adding a third, not very easily comparable set of specs to the already head-scratching differences between Nvidia and AMD architectures. Enter Intel XeSS. When set to "Balanced", XeSS turns out to be a game changer for the A770, getting it an average framerate of 66 fps (with an average minimum of 46 fps) at 1080p, an average of 51 fps (with an average minimum of 38 fps) at 1440p, and an average 33 fps (average minimum 26 fps) at 4K with ray tracing maxed out. Intel's Arc series of GPUs has meant that it's now a three horse race as Team Blue looks to provide a formidable alternative to the longstanding dichotomy between AMD and Nvidia's entries that gamers have faced for ages. To help you decide whether they're worth a go, we've rounded up everything you need to know about the Arc A770 and A750, from their price and performance to where you can actually buy them in the US, UK, Canada and Europe. While the 26 fps average minimum fps at 4K means it's really not playable at that resolution even with XeSS turned on, with settings tweaks, or more modest ray tracing, you could probably bring that up into the low to high 30s, making 4K games playable on this card with ray tracing turned on.

Of course, our full review on both the Arc A770 and A750 will give you all the details you need as to how fast these cards are, but in short, they'll be more than good enough for those who want solid 1080p gaming. The A770 is comparable to an RTX 3060 and an RX 6600 XT in terms of price and performance, as is the A750 too, which actually offered benchmark results that were rather similar to the A770, with a percentage margin of between three and 10 percent in favour of the A770. The only real disadvantage of these cards is their DX9 and DX11 performance, graphics APIs that have become much less popular over the last five years but make up a large proportion of older games. Here, the Intel GPUs are hamstrung by a relatively immature driver and performance suffers as a result. Similarly, you shouldn't get the Arc GPUs if your system doesn't support Resizeable BAR, a technology that allows more direct access to GPU memory - without it enabled, performance tanks. Thankfully, most motherboards made in the last three plus years do support the feature. What are the prices of the Arc A770 and A750?The power connector is an 8-pin and 6-pin combo, so you'll have a pair of cables dangling from the card which may or may not affect the aesthetic of your case, but at least you won't need to worry about a 12VHPWR or 12-pin adapter like you do with Nvidia's RTX 4000-series and 3000-series cards. But those decisions are not as cut and dry as you might think, and Intel's Arc A770 holds up very well against modern midrange offerings, despite really being a last-gen card. And, currently, the 16GB variant is the only 1440p card that you're going to find at this price, even among Nvidia and AMD's last-gen offerings like the RTX 3060 Ti and AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT. So for 1440p gamers on a very tight budget, this card fills a very vital niche, and it's really the only card that does so.

I focused mostly on synthetic and gaming benchmarks since this card is overwhelmingly a gaming graphics card. Though it does have some video content creation potential, it's not enough to dethrone Nvidia's 4000-series GPUs, so it isn't a viable rival in that sense and wasn't tested as such. Arc's ray tracing capabilities have been a bit difficult to pin down up to now. The A380 did deliver better RT performance than the RX 6500 XT, but that's hardly praiseworthy. With four times the cores and hardware, we're expecting a lot more from the A770 and A750 — and Intel has even shown benchmarks where the A770 clearly beat the RTX 3060 with ray tracing enabled. Intel breaks up its architecture into "render slices", which contain 4 Xe Cores, which each contain 128 shaders, a ray tracing processor, and 16 matrix processors (which are directly comparable to Nvidia's vaunted tensor cores at least), which handle graphics upsampling and machine learning workflows. Both 8GB and 16GB versions of the A770 contain eight render slices for a total of 4096 shaders, 32 ray processors, and 512 matrix processors.

Intel's first legitimate discrete GPU in forever

It’s also important to note that Intel’s Arc GPUs will be arriving late. The company originally planned on formally launching them in the US in Q3, following an earlier delay. However, the Oct. 12 launch date shows the Arc A770 will actually land in Q4. These cards are especially good for content creators, with AV1 encoding providing a massive quality boost versus older H.264 and H.265 at the same bitrate, or alternatively a much lower bitrate while maintaining the same quality. According to Gelsinger, Intel heard complaints from gamers about the high prices. “You should be frustrated because you are losing out as a gaming community. And today, we’re fixing that."

That's where GPU prices stand right now, at least — and we expect everything to continue to fall in the coming months, though probably not too much further before parts start getting discontinued and replaced by newer models.Klarna Bank AB (publ) is Authorised by the Swedish Financial Services Authority (Finansinspektionen) and is subject to limited regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority. That's something the RTX 4060 Ti can't manage thanks to its smaller frame buffer (8GB VRAM), and while the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti could theoretically perform better (I have not tested the 16GB so I cannot say for certain), it still has half the memory bus width of the A770, leading to a much lower bandwidth for larger texture files to pass through. Experience supercharged gaming and cutting-edge creation experiences across the Intel Arc A-series family. From high-performance AAA gaming on Intel Arc 7 graphics to enhanced mainstream gaming on Intel Arc 3 graphics, there’s an Arc graphics card for your gaming adventure.