The Intel Arc Alchemist architecture brought a third competitor to the best graphics cards, and while it can't top the GPU benchmarks in terms of performance, there's certainly a strong value proposition. At the same time, there are areas where the drivers still need tuning — Minecraft with ray tracing being one example that comes immediately to mind since it's one of the games in our standard test suite. But Intel hopes to encourage further adoption with the latest announcement of a $40 price cut to the Intel Arc A750, bringing it down to just $250.
It's difficult to say exactly how many people have purchased Intel Arc graphics cards — mobile or desktop — since they first became available in the spring of 2023. I've seen claims that Intel dedicated GPUs accounted for up to 4% of total sales in Q4 2022, but so far Arc GPUs don't show up as individual entries on the Steam Hardware Survey (which will be updated with January data shortly, so maybe that will change). Certainly, dropping the price of the A750 by 14% can't hurt.
Intel is also continuing to push its XeSS (Xe Super Sampling) AI upscaling algorithm as an alternative to Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR technologies. The adoption rate isn't nearly as high, but considering how new Intel is to the dedicated GPU arena, getting 35 games to support XeSS in the first six months or so is pretty decent.
Another feature of the Arc GPUs that's more than just "pretty decent" is the video encoding and decoding support. Arc was the first modern GPU to offer full AV1 support, and the quality of the Quick Sync Video encoding goes head to head with Nvidia's best (with AMD trailing on previous generation GPUs, though we still need to look at the latest RDNA 3 chips).
But it's not all sunshine and flowers. Our own testing of Bright Memory Infinite (using the Bright Memory Infinite benchmark on Steam) and Minecraft shows there's still room for improvement. Another interesting aspect of the Arc GPUs that we've discovered is that, using a Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 32-inch monitor, the DisplayPort connection can only run at up to 4K and 120 Hz, while Nvidia's RTX 20-series and later (using DP1.4a) all support 4K and 240 Hz via Display Stream Compression.
Ultimately, lowering the price of the A750 by $40 probably won't change the minds of millions of gamers, but it does make the overall package more attractive. Intel has also added Nightingale and The Settlers: New Allies to the software bundle for anyone who purchases a new Arc graphics card or system equipped with an Arc GPU. As we've noted before, Intel may not have the fastest cards on the planet, but the value proposition is certainly worth considering.
Which does bring up an interesting question: What's happened with the Arc A580? That's supposed to have the same 8GB of GDDR6 as the A750, but with 24 Xe-cores instead of 28 Xe-cores (3,072 shaders vs. 3,584 shaders on the A750). It also has a lower TBP of 175W compared to 225W and a Game clock of 1700 MHz, or at least that's the theory. With the new price on the A750, the space for an A580 continues to shrink, but maybe Intel could still release something in the $199–$219 range. We're still waiting...
The full slide deck from Intel is included below, for reference.
