Out of nowhere, Acer has announced its entry into the graphics card market officially, with the introduction of its Predator BiFrost GPU on Twitter today. Surprisingly, it's not an Nvidia or AMD-powered graphics card but one featuring Intel's new Arc A770 flagship GPU.
The card itself is very striking and features a design we've never seen before. It incorporates a blower-style fan in the middle and a much larger non-blower fan design to the right. This gives the card a unique aesthetic, with two very different-looking fans cooling the GPU.
At the very least, this unique cooling architecture will make the card easily stand out from the rest of its competitors, which is a good thing for Acer if it plans to gain popularity in the GPU space.
This combination of a blower and non-blower design might actually be good in terms of performance. The blower-style fan in the middle should, in theory, push a lot of the card's exhaust air out the rear of the case, which will reduce ambient temperatures within the chassis under load. This can help keep the card cool and keep other components within the system cool as well.
Aesthetically the card features a metallic-looking shroud with a black finish over the entirety of the card - giving the card a mature look. Both fans incorporate RGB lighting designs, but the much larger rear fan features significantly more RGB lighting compared to the middle fan. Finally, Acer has embedded its Predator gaming logo on the side, and RGB illuminated it.
Powering the card are two 8-pin supplementary power connections.
Introducing the all new @intelgraphics #IntelArc A770 GPU, which we've christened #PredatorBiFrost. Paving the way for a new generation of gaming awesome! pic.twitter.com/MmN4rAszItSeptember 30, 2022
Will it Be an A770 8GB or 16GB?
Unfortunately, all Acer announced was the card's name and a picture of the GPU, with no details about core specifications. All we know is that it will be an A770 8GB or 16GB model.
Intel finally announced full details on its higher trim Arc A750 and A770 GPUs just yesterday, including prices and a release date. All three models, including the Arc A750 8GB, A770 8GB and A770 16GB, will be launching on October 12th, featuring prices at $289, $329 and $349, respectively.
To refresh your memory, the Arc A750 8GB will feature 28 Xe Cores, 3584 shader cores, 448 MXM engines (for AI stuff like XeSS AI upscaling), and a clock speed of 2050MHz. The memory system includes 16Gbps modules operating on a 256-bit wide bus and 8GB of memory capacity.
This GPU will represent the higher-end range of Intel's GPUs, but it is certainly not the flagship part.
That title belongs to the Arc A770, which features 32 Xe cores, 4096 Shader cores, 512 MXM engines and a frequency of 2100MHz. For memory, the card will come in 8GB and 16GB capacities - both of which operate on 17.5Gbps memory modules and a 256-bit wide bus. In this situation, all the 16GB model offers is extra capacity - unlike some of Nvidia's counterparts which boost memory and/or core counts along with the higher memory capacity.
Be sure to check out our unboxing of the Arc A750 and A750, and stay tuned for our initial review of the cards at a later date. Intel showed off some impressive performance numbers, with both cards competing favorably against the RTX 3060 in several titles. Hopefully, we'll see similar results in our labs.
