Intel Arc A750 and A770 review: new budget PC gaming contenders - The Verge

Starting at $289, there’s the Arc A750 for some 1080p gaming, or you can step up to the $329 A770 if you want a little extra power for 1440p gaming.

Instead, it’s aiming at the mainstream PC gamers who are looking for graphics cards that are capable of great 1080p or 1440p gaming.

The Arc A750 undercuts Nvidia’s RTX 3060 $329 retail pricing by $40, and Intel’s A770 matches it head-on.

In my week of testing both cards, the A750 proved capable of a solid 1080p experience, and the A770 just about stretches that same experience to 1440p.

The drivers are very basic compared to AMD or Nvidia, there have been a few bugs here and there, and some game developers are going to have to tweak their games to support Intel’s new GPUs.

You’ll need to connect up both a six-pin and an eight-pin PCIe power connector to the side, and playing Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing enabled at 1440p used a total of 438 watts system power at peak for an A770 paired with Intel’s 12900K CPU.

Unfortunately, due to a tight review embargo and not having immediate access to an RTX 3060, I haven’t been able to compare directly to Nvidia’s $329 budget card, but I think you’ll see from the numbers that these cards are going to comfortably trade blows with an RTX 3060, even if they can’t quite stretch to match the $399 RTX 3060 Ti in most games.

I’ve been testing a variety of games across both 1080p and 1440p and even Intel’s new XeSS competitor to Nvidia’s DLSS.

The results are solid for both cards at 1080p, with the majority of games running at 60fps or far beyond with ultra or high settings enabled.

The Arc A770 jumps nearly 9 percent with XeSS quality enabled at 1440p, but the RTX 3060 Ti manages a far bigger 24 percent increase during the same test.

The biggest problem for XeSS right now is that there just aren’t enough games that support it yet.

Every time I launch Control on an Nvidia GPU, it offers me the option for DirectX 11 or DirectX 12, but the Steam version of the game simply launched into DirectX 11 by default with the A750 and A770.

Flight Simulator runs fine, but it shows that games aren’t always ready to detect and fully support Intel’s new Arc GPUs.

Intel’s XeSS shows some early signs of promise, but we’ll certainly be back to take a closer look at XeSS once there are more games that support it.

Intel’s first two budget GPUs offer impressive performance for the 1080p crowd and even a boost for those willing to pick the more expensive A770 card and move to 1440p.

Although I haven’t been able to directly compare these cards to an RTX 3060, I’m confident the A750 and A770 will trade blows here at an important budget level of the PC gaming market.

Intel’s Arc cards are so new that there will be some performance limitations for certain games and early driver issues.