Intel has just released a new video showing the performance of its upcoming Arc A750 graphics card beating Nvidia's RTX 3060 in a selection of games. Maybe in a very select selection of games, it needs to be said.
Intel is getting busy teasing its new GPUs at the moment. After launching its first discrete GPU, the Arc A380, as an entry-level China exclusive it is now starting to get the marketing ball rolling on its higher end Arc 7-series card, the Arc A750. Fresh from giving Gamers Nexus access to its new graphics cards, Intel's own Ryan Shrout has again taken to YouTube, this time to give a little performance breakdown of the new GPU.
The specfic one he's playing with, and the one Tom Petersen was showing off to Gamers Nexus, is the Arc A750 Limited Edition, which I would expect is something akin to a reference factory overclocked version straight out of Intel. At the very least, it's going to be as fast an A750 card as it can make, anyway.
In the video, Shrout benchmarks Cyberpunk 2077 on High settings at 1440p, and gets a very respectable average of 60fps (50fps min). "This is a game that works and plays really well with Intel Arc," he says.
"Across this game, and others like it, you'll see that the Intel Arc A750 performs great. Beating other GPUs in the market today, in the same segment."
The inference here is that the Arc A750 is being bracketed with the Nvidia RTX 3060, and is therefore likely to have a price to match. I expect Intel would be going by the card's MSRP rather than the current, still-inflated, retail price, which is $329. You could maybe expect the Arc A750 to be around the $299 mark.
The point about select games, however, does need to be spoken about. Intel has shown frame rate performance sitting up to 17% above the RTX 3060 in five specific games.
"Just on this specific set of games, that translates into up to 17% better frame rates," says Shrout. "Now the performance of Arc won't look like this in all games, but this demonstration was a great view of what Arc is capable of with the right game enablement and software engineering. We have an entire team of engineers working to make it happen."
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Which suggests that it's going to take some work from developers to get the Arc Alchemist GPUs working well with their games, as well as Intel's own software engineers hammering away at the drivers to ensure they get the most out of their hardware.
You can see the benefits of Intel's software optimisations in these games, and it was a similar story with the Arc A380, which had specific optimisations for 3DMark benchmarks. The card performed incredibly well in that application but was a lot less impressive in games it wasn't optimised for.
On the one hand that suggests there's performance in the tank if Intel can access it, but on the other it makes me think there will be a bunch of games that the new Arc A750 really doesn't look good playing.
We'll know for sure soon because Shrout says, "the entire team is incredibly excited for you to get your hands on these products later this summer."
