Intel Arc A770 Graphics

Product Information

The situation in Red Dead Redemption 2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider for the Arc A770 is identical to what we saw in Total War: Three Kingdoms. We did run an extra test with the Intel Arc A770 using XeSS, as this is one of the titles that will support XeSS at launch. But we don’t have DLSS and FSR ready for the competing cards in this title. Nonetheless, you can see that using XeSS gives the Arc A770 a considerable boost.

While the 26 fps average minimum fps at 4K means it's really not playable at that resolution even with XeSS turned on, with settings tweaks, or more modest ray tracing, you could probably bring that up into the low to high 30s, making 4K games playable on this card with ray tracing turned on. These settings and others can be adjusted using Intel’s new Arc Control Center program. This program runs as an overlay when open, which prevented us from getting screenshots of it with our A770 card, but here's a look at the Performance section of the software, in use with the lower-end Arc A380...Experience supercharged gaming and cutting-edge creation experiences across the Intel Arc A-series family. From high-performance AAA gaming on Intel Arc 7 graphics to enhanced mainstream gaming on Intel Arc 3 graphics, there’s an Arc graphics card for your gaming adventure. I spent about two weeks with the Intel Arc A770 in total, with a little over half that time using it as my main GPU on my personal PC. I used it for gaming, content creation, and other general-purpose use with varying demands on the card. It’s also important to note that Intel’s Arc GPUs will be arriving late. The company originally planned on formally launching them in the US in Q3, following an earlier delay. However, the Oct. 12 launch date shows the Arc A770 will actually land in Q4. Intel's Xe HPG architecture inside the Arc A770 introduces a whole other way to arrange the various co-processors that make up a GPU, adding a third, not very easily comparable set of specs to the already head-scratching differences between Nvidia and AMD architectures.

I focused mostly on synthetic and gaming benchmarks since this card is overwhelmingly a gaming graphics card. Though it does have some video content creation potential, it's not enough to dethrone Nvidia's 4000-series GPUs, so it isn't a viable rival in that sense and wasn't tested as such.

The Intel Arc A770 isn't the best 1440p graphics card out there, but it's better than you might think

But taking the current performance results, and assuming we'd game at 1440p or 4K, this author would be highly tempted to buy one of these for personal use. Its current performance is good enough in recent games, and that large pool of RAM is hard to walk away from. Driver improvements and better consistency are still definitely needed, but the Arc A770 is a very promising card and may well improve like fine aged wine. Intel breaks up its architecture into "render slices", which contain 4 Xe Cores, which each contain 128 shaders, a ray tracing processor, and 16 matrix processors (which are directly comparable to Nvidia's vaunted tensor cores at least), which handle graphics upsampling and machine learning workflows. Both 8GB and 16GB versions of the A770 contain eight render slices for a total of 4096 shaders, 32 ray processors, and 512 matrix processors. Xe HPG microarchitecture is engineered from the ground-up to deliver high performance, efficiency, and scalability for gamers and creators. Intel Xe Super Sampling technology (XeSS) takes your gaming experience to the next level with AI-enhanced upscaling enabling more performance with high image fidelity. XeSS is optimized for Intel® Arc™ graphics products with the ability to take advantage of XMX AI hardware acceleration. Those are the launch MSRPs from October 2022, of course, and the cards have come down considerably in price in the year since their release, and you can either card for about 20% to 25% less than that. This is important, since the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD Radeon RX 7600 are very close to the 16GB Arc A770 cards in terms of current prices, and offer distinct advantages that will make potential buyers want to go with the latter rather than the former.

Overall, the software is cleanly laid out and provides a good amount of information, including the card's active power draw and usage specs. Gaming PCs Liquid Series® PCs Video Editing PCs Pro Audio Computers Professional Workstations Desktop PCs We’ve not heard yet from any OEMs that will be producing Intel A770 graphics cards, but for the foreseeable future, Intel will be operating as a graphics card OEM, too. Its flagship is sold under the name “Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition,” but from what Intel tells us, this will not truly be a limited-run card; it will continue to be sold for some time. We hope so, as the card itself looks and feels quite well-made. You're also getting three DisplayPort 2.0 outputs and an HDMI 2.1 output, which puts it in the same camp as Nvidia's recent GPUs, but can't match AMD's recent move to DisplayPort 2.1, which will enable faster 8K video output. As it stands, the Intel Arc A770 is limited to 8K@60Hz, just like Nvidia. Will you be doing much 8K gaming on a 16GB card? Absolutely not, but as we get more 8K monitors next year, it'd be nice to have an 8K desktop running at 165Hz, but that's a very speculative prospect at this point, so it's probably not anything anyone looking at the Arc A770 needs to be concerned about.

Experience immersive high-performance gaming.

Despite that, it still manages to be a fantastic value on the market right now given its low MSRP and fairly solid performance, rivaling the RTX 4060 Ti on the numbers. In reality though, with this card selling for significantly less than its MSRP, it is inarguably the best value among midrange cards right now, and it's not even close.