After an eternity of delays and teases, Intel’s first Arc desktop graphics cards are finally releasing, with the Arc A750 GPU or Arc A770 GPU launching on October 12 for $329 (or $349 for a model with 16GB of memory). GGDR6 instead of 8GB). Turns out this won’t be the only Arc GPU released that day. The Arc A750 will hit the streets at the same time, Intel revealed today, with a price tag of $289 meant to bring pain to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060.
Intel
Intel also released a chart claiming that the A770 and A750 offer insanely more performance per dollar than the RTX 3060 (using an average price of $418 for the RTX 3060 taken on Sept. 22 from Newegg’s listings). It’s an “absolutely amazing price that will redefine the market,” Intel Fellow Tom Petersen told reporters at a briefing.
Intel
We need to wait for independent reviews to verify this, of course, especially considering the various caveats tied to the Intel Arc’s gaming performance. Intel’s Xe HPG architecture is optimized for modern graphics APIs such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan. These technologies are building huge steam, but most mainstream games – especially outside of the AAA space – are built using DirectX 11 and some esports games still use the downright old DX9. Benchmark graphics released by Intel showed the Arc A750 holding up against the RTX 3060 in many titles, but falling slightly behind in many others.
Intel
Intel
That said, Intel has promised to price the Arc according to its worst artists and if the above graphics are true, it certainly seems to be. (The two graphs above show Intel’s alleged performance-per-dollar advantage for the Arc A750 over the RTX 3060 in each game, no raw frame rates.)
The Arc’s memory controller was also built specifically to take advantage of the larger chunks of memory enabled by enabling the PCIe resizable bar (or Smart Access Memory as it’s called on Ryzen systems). Intel systems back to 9th Gen Core processors have been updated to support ReBAR, but you won’t want Arc if your system doesn’t have it. “If you don’t have PCIe ReBAR, buy a 3060,” Petersen told reporters.
All that said, these are incredibly attractive prices for Intel’s debut Arc GPUs, if the proof really is in the pudding. Bear in mind that gamers have suffered from debilitating graphics card prices for years, and the RTX 3060’s still high cost reflects that. Gamers just responded to the extremely high prices of the GeForce RTX 4090 and 4080 with a mixture of outrage and indifference. Even today, my colleague Michael Crider argued that the price of Nvidia’s RTX 40 series is a golden opportunity for AMD and Intel.
Intel
With Nvidia and AMD on the cusp of new GPU generations after more than a year of delays on the Arc, Intel’s graphics card debut is already starting a little on the back foot – but these launch prices for the Arc A770 and A750 prove that Intel still intends to come out swinging. We’ll see where the benchmarks end up falling (especially compared to AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 which is worth $230-$260 on the streets), but if the Arc A770 and A750 really end up meeting and sometimes outperforming the RTX 3060 from Nvidia for a lot less money, it could really redefine the mainstream GPU market that will likely be left alone by AMD and Nvidia for several months to come.
bow is finally almost here. All that’s left to do is wait for benchmarks. Again, the launch of the Intel Arc A770 and A750 on October 12 – the same day that Nvidia’s $1,599 RTX 4090 hits stores.
