Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition Review: Bringing Back Midrange GPUs

Ray tracing can be extremely demanding, and Nvidia GPUs have generally held the lead at similar price points compared to AMD's GPUs. With Arc, we now have a third player, and as we hinted earlier, it looks as though Intel put a lot more effort into the ray tracing aspects of the hardware.

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If you're used to seeing Nvidia demolish AMD at ray tracing, Arc should be a nice breath of fresh air. The A770 LE soundly beats the RTX 3060 by 25% on average at 1080p medium, though Arc couldn't run Minecraft. That's apparently something Microsoft needs to fix, not a driver bug — the game looks for "known" GPUs and only allows you to enable DXR on certain models. That's… annoying, and Microsoft, of all companies, ought to know better. Query the hardware for its capabilities and then expose the functionality, rather than limiting support to known quantities! But I digress.

AMD's RX 6650 XT doesn't do nearly as well with our DXR test suite. The A770 is 50% faster at 1080p medium and is still 21% faster than the costlier RX 6700 XT. That's a nominal win for Intel and Arc over the competition… except we need to consider Nvidia's DLSS.

Intel offers a reasonable competitor to DLSS in its XeSS, but DLSS has been promoted for four years now. XeSS is just getting started. Right now, there are only a handful of games with XeSS support, and we can imagine Intel basically pleading and cajoling game developers into adding it. Theoretically, anything with DLSS 2 could be made to support XeSS (and FSR 2) with minimal effort, but getting that to happen is another matter.

Depending on the game, DLSS in Quality mode typically improves performance by 20–40 percent. Quality mode is nearly indistinguishable from native rendering and sometimes looks superior, so it's a great option. That would easily put Nvidia's RTX 3060 back in the lead, but if a game also supports XeSS, we'd be back to an Arc victory.

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More or less maxing out the ray tracing settings at 1080p can cripple performance, particularly without DLSS, XeSS, or FSR 2 support. Comparing apples to apples, though, Intel's A770 LE continues to deliver impressive results. It clearly wasn't kidding when it said it put a lot of effort into the RTUs (ray tracing units) and related hardware.

At 1080p ultra, the A770 still leads the 3060 by 23%, beats the 6700 XT by 19%, and demolishes the RX 6650 XT by 50% again. The RTX 3060 Ti is still 9% faster, but that's also a more expensive card. The only real blemish on Arc is the currently buggy (memory leak?) Bright Memory Infinite result. Even in the very demanding Cyberpunk 2077, the A770 still manages to go toe to toe with Nvidia's 3060 — and let's not even look at the RTX 3050, please.

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What about 1440p ultra with DXR? Well, that's a bit more than Arc A770 can manage, at least with native rendering. To be fair, the same is true of most other graphics cards that cost less than $500. Only the RTX 3070 and above can break 30 fps across our DXR test suite at 1440p, or AMD's RX 6800 XT. If you prefer putting it in older terms, the A770 LE basically ties the RTX 2080 Super at these settings. Not bad for about half the price and twice the VRAM, three years later.

Of the five games we tested, only Control and Metro Exodus Enhanced reached playable framerates of 30 fps or more. With XeSS Performance mode, you could probably double a lot of the numbers and that could make everything playable in a pinch, but at present, the confirmed XeSS titles are relatively few in number. Which brings us to our XeSS testing on the next page. 

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