Intel demos the Arc A770 and promises to "kill everyone in price to performance" with class-leading execution in some titles

Intel is continuing its marketing run of the Arc Alchemist GPUs. We previously got the official benchmarks results of the Arc A750. This time around Intel’s Ryan Shrout and Tom Peterson have appeared on Linus Tech Tips (LTT) and showcased the Arc A770. While we don’t get complete specifications of the board, we do get to see some information regarding clock speed and power targets.

In the video, we see that the card operated at 2.5 GHz in the default state. The GPU ran at a base power limit of 190 W which can be increased to 280 W during overclocking.

The performance of the Arc A770 is a bit tricky to explain as it depends heavily on the DirectX API version. According to Tom, Intel is classifying games into three tiers based on their level of optimization for Arc. Games that use DirectX 12 will run the best on Arc GPUs and are therefore classified as Tier 1. Modern games such as Cyberpunk 2077, Fortnite, and Tomb Raider fall into this category. Tier 2 games are those that support DirectX 12 and Vulcan but aren’t optimized for Intel’s graphics boards. These games will run well on Arc but not as good as Tier 1 titles.

Games that only support DirectX 11 and older will run the worst on Intel Arc as they are poorly optimized for the platform. To show how much of a difference DirectX 12 makes on Arc, the video displayed Tomb Raider running at only 39 FPS in DirectX 11 mode and 80 FPS in DirectX 12 on the Arc A770. Cyberpunk 2077 was also demoed on 1440p/High settings but without any FPS counter. Linus guessed that the frame rate in Cyberpunk 2077 felt somewhere between 50 and 65 FPS.

In addition to DirectX 12, Intel Arc boards also benefit from Resizable Bar. The company expects a 5-45% performance uplift with Resizable Bar enabled. The claim may hold some water as LTT described “accidentally” seeing a 43% gain when enabling Resizable Bar.

Intel is making tall claims about the performance of Arc. Tom went as far as to say that Arc is going to “kill everyone in price to performance” and will have “best in class performance outright” in Tier 1 titles.

Team Blue is also pulling no punches when it comes to pricing. The company is going to be pricing the Arc A770 and other boards based on their performance in Tier 3 games. In other words, even if Intel is considerably faster in some titles than the competition, the Arc GPUs will likely undercut similarly positioned boards from Nvidia and AMD.

Sadly, we don’t have any official pricing information from Intel as of now.

Buy GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 3060 Eagle OC on Amazon