It seems like Intel is pushing the debut of its discrete Arc graphics cards for good, but so far all we’ve gotten at retail is the lower end of the series. That will change very soon. At the company’s innovation conference, the flagship GPU finally received an official price and date: $329 and October 12.
The top-of-the-line card will come in 8GB and 16GB varieties (presumably the price indicates the 8GB version), both branded as the first-party “Limited Edition” variant. Intel CEO Pat Gelisnger specifically highlighted the affordable nature of the card: while this is the most powerful version of Intel’s Alchemist GPU, it will compete in the lower mid-range compared to Nvidia’s and AMD’s offerings. From what we’ve seen so far, the Arc A770 will compete with the GeForce RTX 3060 and Radeon RX 6600 XT, both of which retail at around $350-$400 in the current market.
Without offering much in the way of pure benchmarking comparisons, Intel’s presentation mentioned that the Arc A770 has “65% better peak performance than the ray tracing competition”. Specifically which card this competition represents, and which game or benchmark the test was performed on, was not mentioned, although in the past Intel has compared the Arc A770’s ray tracing performance to Nvidia’s RTX 3060. Intel has confirmed that the Arc A770 is being sent to reviewers ahead of retail release, so expect the usual detailed analysis. Intel has previously indicated that it will be aggressive on pricing, positioning its cards based on gaming performance in its third tier of testing rather than ideal scenarios.
The Arc A770 has 32 Xe 6nm graphics cores running at 2100Mhz, with 8GB or 16GB of GDDR6 video memory and a 256-bit memory bus. With the ultra-low-end covered and the mid-range being introduced, Intel has yet to say when the Arc A750 will be released. With Nvidia’s ultra-expensive RTX 40 series already announced, and AMD set to unveil new high-end GPUs in November, trying to claim a position as an affordable alternative could be a very smart move.
