The Intel Arc A770 and A750 Limited Edition review kit has arrived, and we're now allowed to show you pictures and videos of the kit. Of course, this is sort of dumb since lots of other places have been doing unboxing videos for a month or more, including Intel. Still, we're excited to finally have Intel's "real" competitor for the best graphics cards in the house (because Intel DG1 and Arc A380 don't really count in my book), and we'll be working on testing for the review over the coming days.
Intel revealed the official Arc A770 and A750 pricing yesterday, which is good news for anyone looking to upgrade to a new graphics card without spending a ton of money. Midrange GPUs are back in style, or at least that's the message Intel seems to be sending, with the A750 priced at $289 and going head to head with Nvidia's RTX 3060. We'll see how that matchup ends up in our upcoming review, and the Arc cards are set to go on sale October 12.
October 12, isn't something else supposed to be happening that day? Oh, yeah, that's when Nvidia will also launch its GeForce RTX 4090, priced at $1,599 and decidedly nowhere near midrange pricing or performance. It's an odd dichotomy, but if Intel wants to get some discrete GPU market share, this should be a promising start.
The review kit contained the A770 and A750 Limited Edition cards, Intel's own brand for Arc. Think of these like the LE car models that you might see from various manufacturers. These won't be a limited production run or anything like that, though we'd love to know just how many Arc GPUs Intel has ordered from TSMC.
To quickly recap, the Arc Alchemist GPUs are built using TSMC's N6 process node, with a die size of 406mm^2. That's a pretty chunky die, all things considered — smaller than AMD's Navi 21 (520mm^2) but larger than Navi 22 (335mm^2). With a price point starting south of $300, Intel certainly isn't going to make a ton of money off these GPUs, but it could carve out a modest piece of the graphics card pie.
The two Limited Edition cards are mostly the same, except the A770 includes RGB lighting, along with a USB cable if you want to sync up the lighting with your motherboard's LEDs. Otherwise, the major design elements are identical, with a dual-slot form factor, two 15-blade fans, and 8-pin + 6-pin power connectors. Even TBP (Total Board Power) is the same at 225W.
Under the hood, the A770 Limited Edition has 16GB of faster 17.5 Gbps GDDR6 memory, with 32 Xe cores. The A750 Limited Edition only has 8GB of 16 Gbps GDDR6, with 28 Xe cores. Based on the specs, which you can see below, we expect the A770 will deliver about 10–15% more performance — more in cases where VRAM capacity comes into play. Note that the A770 8GB model will drop the VRAM speed, so we can't help but think the extra $20 for the 16GB card will be worth the upsell.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | Arc A770 | Arc A750 | Arc A580 | Arc A380 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Architecture | ACM-G10 | ACM-G10 | ACM-G10 | ACM-G11 |
| Process Technology | TSMC N6 | TSMC N6 | TSMC N6 | TSMC N6 |
| Transistors (Billion) | 21.7 | 21.7 | 21.7 | 7.2 |
| Die size (mm^2) | 406 | 406 | 406 | 157 |
| Xe-Cores | 32 | 28 | 24 | 8 |
| GPU Cores (Shaders) | 4096 | 3584 | 3072 | 1024 |
| MXM Engines | 512 | 448 | 384 | 128 |
| RTUs | 32 | 28 | 24 | 8 |
| Game Clock (MHz) | 2100 | 2050 | 1700 | 2000 |
| VRAM Speed (Gbps) | 17.5 (16GB) / 16 (8GB) | 16 | 16 | 15.5 |
| VRAM (GB) | 16 / 8 | 8 | 8 | 6 |
| VRAM Bus Width | 256 | 256 | 256 | 96 |
| ROPs | 128 | 128 | 128 | 32 |
| TMUs | 256 | 224 | 192 | 64 |
| TFLOPS FP32 (Boost) | 17.2 | 14.7 | 10.4 | 4.1 |
| TFLOPS FP16 (MXM) | 138 | 118 | 84 | 33 |
| Bandwidth (GBps) | 560 (16GB) / 512 (8GB) | 512 | 512 | 186 |
| PCIe Link | x16 4.0 | x16 4.0 | x16 4.0 | x8 4.0 |
| TBP (watts) | 225 | 225 | 175 | 75 |
| Launch Date | Oct 12, 2022 | Oct 12, 2022 | ? | June 2022 |
| Starting Price | $349 (16GB) / $329 (8GB) | $289 | ? | $139 |
Intel seems confident in its ability to compete with Nvidia's RTX 3060 with either of the Arc A700 models. That's all well and good, but we do have to point out that AMD also has cards selling for around $300. For example, the Radeon RX 6650 XT now starts at $299 (after a $20 rebate card), while the Radeon RX 6600 start at $229.
According to our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, those AMD cards come in just above and below the RTX 3060 in standard gaming performance. Then again, the RTX 3060 easily outclasses the 6650 XT in ray tracing games by around 30%, though Intel seems more confident in Arc's ray tracing prowess. XeSS and DLSS also need to factor into the equation, with DLSS having a lengthy head start in terms of adoption rates.
It's going to be an interesting end to 2022, in other words. Besides Arc GPUs finally arriving, Nvidia RTX 40-series Ada Lovelace GPUs and AMD RX 7000-series RDNA 3 GPUs are set to launch in the near future. All indications are that AMD and Nvidia are tackling the high-end and enthusiast performance segments first, meaning Intel should have several months to make a name for its Arc offerings in the budget and midrange markets.
We'll have the full A770 and A750 reviews ready in time for the official launch date, so check back then.
