Welcome to the 3-month check-in on Intel Arc. I’m back at it again with the Intel Arc A770 Limited
Edition to see what kinds of improvement, if any, come with another month on the market.
While there are no major claims from Intel with this driver launch, one game FINALLY saw
a performance improvement, and it's one I think everyone will be happy about. So let’s get to it.
New games mean new drivers! And January is no different. With the release of the
much anticipated, and now the recipient of the outrage pony stampede, Forspoken. With
its launch came a new driver just in time for me to get started on this check-in. Oh, yeah,
Forspoken was added to the list of games for me to track, and we'll see how well that goes over time,
so hold tight. But before we kick it off I want to remind everyone of the process I use here.
All tests done on the Arc A770 Limited Edition were performed on my X570 test bench with a
Ryzen 9 5900X at the helm, and Resizable BAR engaged. 32GB of DDR4 3600MHz DRAM rounds out
the core of the system, and all the games are played from a PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD. Remember,
most of the ‘launch’ numbers are provided by Brad’s initial review on PCWorld.com using an
almost identical system, but I will continue to add more games of my own over time. I am
including the 1% low metrics as well as average FPS so I can ensure a more granular look at
performance differentials. If there are any other stats or games you’d like to see please
let me know in the comments below, and while you are down there don’t forget to subscribe
and smash the crap out of that bell to see next month's results! Now onto the testing results.
Okay, this time I'm changing the way I’ll present the data, this time using a combined chart with
games that haven’t changed much since the previous month. The chart you see now is showing all of
the 1080p averages that didn’t change much from the previous month. Obviously, games
like Counter-Strike and Total War saw massive uplifts at one point, but now that’s tapered off.
Now we’ll shift to the 1% Lows chart because we wanted to keep them included but didn’t want to
overdo any one chart. It’s already so much data, to begin with. But like I mentioned, most of the
games I've been tracking saw little to no changes across the board, so not much to talk about here.
Stepping up to 1440p we see the same list of titles, which would be expected. And being able
to see all of these on the same chart really shows that the Arc A770 is pretty competent at
driving 1440p gaming if 60 FPS is your target. Albeit Cyberpunk still puts the screws to it.
Even the 1% lows are quite favorable for a good 1440p experience. And honestly
dropping most of these games down a peg on the graphics quality settings,
or using some sort of up scaling technology, would make all of them play even better. I didn't expect
big changes to performance every month I'm doing this, but it's still worth reporting on.
Luckily one game, in particular, did see an improvement, and it's a big one. Count your
wins here Intel, because I'm certainly sure they are, because Modern Warfare 2 is still
burning up the charts. At 1080p Ultra it shows performance going from 72 FPS
on Average with the launch driver to now 78 FPS on average. That's an 8% increase,
but that pales in comparison to the 18% performance increase on the 1% Lows.
At 1440p the story isn’t quite as drastic in raw FPS, but the boost is coming along. I’ll
reiterate that this is a game that you’d want to take advantage of XeSS with for sure. But it was
the lone game on my list that saw improvement, so it seems Intel is watching this one closely.
Something else I wanted to do this month was look at Borderlands 3 again, but this time through the
lens of DX11 since it was suggested by viewers. The idea here is to see if a game that has both
DX12 AND DX11 support has seen upticks in performance for both APIs at the same time.
At 1080p Badass settings, well, it has. And good ones too, along the line of
what Modern Warfare 2 has seen. Even 1440p both APIs had an increase for both metrics.
Steady but not earth-shattering. I was curious going into this testing to see
if one API got more love than the other in the same game, but it doesn't look to be the case.
Okay, with all of that out of the way what about a brand new title that got day-one drivers? Yes,
this is the part where I talk about the internet's latest punching bag, Forspoken.
Regardless of how you feel about the game itself, Day One drivers are a big deal in
the world of PC gaming, and I wanted to see if the Forspoken Day One Driver made a difference.
For my testing at 1080p High settings, the newer driver yielded about a 10% boost on the 1% lows.
At 1440p we see a repeat of the story. The game did feel smoother on the newer drivers
and I would highly encourage anyone of the 3 people playing Forspoken on an Arc card to take
advantage of XeSS in this one, it looks great and performs even better when making use of it.
With the games out of the way, what about stability? Well,
general stability feels like it’s there for my experience. I didn’t at any time
have the system freak out on me when switching resolutions or changing games. I’d still like
to see the Arc Control Center NOT take up the whole screen however, that is a bit annoying.
No strange crashes and every game I tested ran without issue, unlike at launch. But
I’m still having issues when running through a capture card out of HDMI where the screen
will randomly lose connection. It’s better, but still, an issue, so streamers wanting
to game on the Arc A770 and run it through a streaming computer may find it problematic.
Well, that’s the first quarter of the Arc A770 Limited Edition in the bag,
we’re certainly starting to see things level out. Stability is improving, and drivers are coming
regularly. I still want to test out other aspects of the line such as the built-in game capture that
takes advantage of AV1 as well as XeSS testing AND content creation performance and stability.
But, I would love to hear how you want to see this series progress as we move
on. Let me know down in the comment section and while you’re down there
make sure you haven’t missed that subscribe button and the bell so that you don’t miss
the next one and catch even more PC hardware and software goodness!