Intel: Arc A770 GPUs Will Launch “Very Soon”

Arc A750
(Image credit: Intel)

Intel plans to launch its long-awaited Arc Alchemist graphics cards for desktop PCs 'very soon,' the company said in an interview and revealed some more details about its upcoming boards. 

The very first Intel Arc graphics card in years designed for gamers will be its own Arc A770 Limited Edition add-in-board (AIB) with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, reports PC Games Hardware citing Intel's Tom Petersen, and Intel Fellow, and Ryan Shrout, the company's marketing specialist. This product will co-exist with custom offerings from the company's partners carrying the same graphics processing unit. Those custom Arc A770 AIBs will carry either 16GB or 8GB of memory as Intel has approved configurations with 8GB of RAM. In addition, makers of graphics cards will also offer Arc A750 boards with 8GB of GDDR6. 

Intel considers its Arc A770 offerings as competitors for Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, whereas the Arc A750 are positioned against Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060. Last week Intel already published benchmark results showing its Arc A770 better in ray tracing than Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060, so perhaps this is the company re-emphasizing its performance-related thesis, which obviously needs to be put to independent test. 

Some of the Arc A700-series boards from Intel's AIB partners will come factory-overclocked and with increased power limits, so these boards will offer higher performance when compared to models with default clocks. Will those boards be among the best gaming graphics cards available this fall? Only time will tell.

It is noteworthy that Intel strongly recommends using its Arc graphics cards with newer systems supporting resizable base address register (BAR) as without this technology Intel's Arc GPUs may experience an up to 40% performance drop. However, a good thing is that Arc graphics processors will fully support Microsoft's DirectStorage technology, so expect performance of systems featuring these devices (as well as compatible SSDs) to improve once games that use this application programming interface (API) emerge. 

While it is evident that Intel's Arc A770 graphics cards will not be competitive against next-generation offerings from AMD and Nvidia in high resolutions, Intel hopes that its four XeSS upscaling modes (performance, balanced, quality, and ultra quality) will provide a decent balance between performance and quality, which will to some degree compensate for lower performance in resolutions like 4K. 

Speaking of high resolutions output in general, Intel says that its upcoming ACM-G10 GPUs do not support native HDMI 2.1 output, which is why to add an appropriate connector to an Arc A700 graphics card, an onboard DisplayPort 2.0 to HDMI 2.1 converter is needed. Interestingly, despite the fact that Intel enabled DisplayPort 2.0 with UHBR 20 support in drivers, it looks like for now only UHBR 10 will be supported. If this is accurate, this means that the Intel's Arc A700 boards will not support a 'native' 8K output and will have to use two DisplayPort connections to handle an 8Kp60 monitor. For now, 6Kp60 and 8Kp60 displays are not exactly common, which justifies lack of DP 2.0 UHBR 20 support, but it is still a bit odd to see Intel dropping one of the potential advantages of its GPUs. 

While Intel is eager to talk about performance and features of its upcoming Arc A700-series discrete graphics cards for desktops, it does not disclose another key characteristic of these boards: their price. Keeping in mind that these products are set to launch 'very soon,' we are going to find everything out shortly. So, stay tuned.

Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • LolaGT
    Yup, any day now.

    After so may of those statements it is kind of meaningless.
    When I see a boatload of actual benchmarks up on YT then I will think they might be out.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    Alchemist has been "coming soon" for almost a year now. This has reached stale meme status at this point.
    Reply
  • Ogotai
    bah, who really cares about Arc now ? no one i know cares about it any more. they did like 6+ months ago, now, not so much.
    Reply
  • ezst036
    I'm looking forward to it. Intel has to do it as they can. The second gen will probably also have release to market issues - likely a lot less as lessons are learned. The third gen will be the one that has a flawless rollout.
    Reply
  • jp7189
    ezst036 said:
    I'm looking forward to it. Intel has to do it as they can. The second gen will probably also have release to market issues - likely a lot less as lessons are learned. The third gen will be the one that has a flawless rollout.
    Let's hope there is a 2nd and 3rd gen. By all accounts 1st gen is a massive hemorrhage of financial loss. It's going to be hard to convince the bean counters to keep pouring money in to this project.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    jp7189 said:
    Let's hope there is a 2nd and 3rd gen. By all accounts 1st gen is a massive hemorrhage of financial loss. It's going to be hard to convince the bean counters to keep pouring money in to this project.
    The first generation of almost anything new Intel gets into always makes spectacular losses. The first generation of almost anything of substantial complexity by any company rarely covers the costs to start the thing from scratch. Though Xe-based GPUs aren't exactly new since Xe-based IGPs have been around since Tiger Lake, which make the recurring hiccups that much more unexpected. Still, Intel will need a graphics division for IGP even if it scraps dGPUs, so the likelihood of Intel quitting after only one bad run is effectively zero.

    As I have written in other threads predicting the end of ARC, as AMD and Nvidia drift further away from sub-$300 GPUs, the need for decent IGPs to pick up that slack will become much greater and Intel giving up on decent graphics performance would hand over most of that market to AMD by default. I doubt Intel can afford to hand over a substantial chunk of its 60% of all PC graphics market share (and 70% of IGPs) to AMD, so Intel effectively cannot afford to fail here even if it takes three generations to produce something worthwhile and on schedule.
    Reply
  • Neilbob
    ezst036 said:
    I'm looking forward to it. Intel has to do it as they can. The second gen will probably also have release to market issues - likely a lot less as lessons are learned. The third gen will be the one that has a flawless rollout.

    They're on around their 22nd generation of x86 CPU releases and half the time don't quite manage a flawless rollout ... :p
    Reply
  • velocityg4
    While performance for mid range gamers may be decent. I don't think I'd want to be a alpha tester for Intel's ability to make reliable performance gaming drivers. AMD and nVidia still have issues with many years of experience and constantly have to release driver patches. I'd hate to think what the Intel experience will be like. Especially on games more than a few years old which they have little incentive to make patches for.
    Reply
  • The Historical Fidelity
    I would have felt this was good for the GPU market a year ago, but ARC being released now (a couple months away from nvidia 4000 and amd 7000 release) means that Intel a750 and a770 won’t be competing with the rtx 3060 and rx 6600xt in price and performance, but instead have to be priced even lower towards the next gen rtx4050 and rx 7500xt. That is not good margins for graphics cards that were meant for the 2021 market.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    The Historical Fidelity said:
    That is not good margins for graphics cards that were meant for the 2021 market.
    Intel was never going to get great margins from Alchemist simply due to being the new kid on the dGPU block with a 20+ years long history of quirky IGP drivers regarding gaming. Alchemist was always going to be a financial sacrifice for Intel to identify its worst weaknesses. Many of those realizations are likely too late for Battlemage, so Celestial is probably be the earliest we can expect real competition.
    Reply