INTEL HAS DONE IT. Well, they did something. Intel Arc Alchemist is
actually here - or it will be 10 days from now - You know what,
screw the clickbait, let’s get into it. We’ll talk gaming and creative applications here.
A770: $329 for 8GB of VRAM or $349 for the 16GB of RAM “Limited Edition” - which is really just
Intel’s version of their Founder’s Edition, a card they make in-house. I asked during a press
briefing how “limited” they’re supposed to be and was told that it just comes down to demand,
but they have no plans to EOL them and stop making them anytime in the
short run. So why they’re only charging $20 for double the VRAM is odd to me,
especially when other GPU manufacturers keep telling me VRAM is a significant cost to
the card. Also the Limited Edition has slightly higher memory speed.
A750: $289 and has 8GB of VRAM, as well. In a way, this means that even their lower-spec
card will have some additional longevity as far as memory requirements are concerned,
but in my testing the VRAM isn’t all that useful on it due to speed.
The Limited Edition cards are beautiful. Soft, rounded corners, matte shells,
diffused lighting, with USB controllable LEDs on the A770. They even have HDMI 2.1 apparently,
due to Intel implementing some sort of special DisplayPort conversion onboard - something they
will spec out for board partners, but board partners may still use HDMI 2.0 anyway.
Intel poised these cards against Nvidia’s RTX 3060, a card with a MSRP also at $329,
though usually cannot be found new under $400. I picked one up around $409 for this review,
but I didn’t have the means to also get a RTX 3060ti for comparison,
but I am including the base RTX 2080 - a card you can get used around $315 right now.
### Gaming
So does the A770 blow the RTX 3060 out of the water? Or is this a chance for Nvidia to tell
Intel to sit back down and learn a bit more? Well… neither, really. This is weird. There’s
honestly no clear winner here other than the insane value of a used RTX 2080 at the moment.
Running Halo: Infinite with the min and max framerates set to 120 at 1440p, the RTX 2080 and
3060 both about hold 120FPS on average, meanwhile the Intel A770 and A750 hold more around 100FPS,
weirdly enough. This game isn’t super optimized still, but I wanted to make sure I tested it.
Another favorite of mine, Warframe using the new Enhanced graphics engine and DirectX12 at 1440p
on high settings, the RTX 2080 dominates, but the RTX 3060 and A770 are neck-in-neck. These
felt like near-identical experiences, though the A750 did lag behind a fair bit below the flock.
In Splitgate, the A770 gives the RTX 3060 a fair lead for once,
but as long as you’re targeting 240hz or lower, all four cards will do you fine.
The RTX 3060, A770, and A750 are nearly identical in Monster Hunter: Rise at 1440p on high,
with all 3 running worse than the RTX 2080’s worst framerates by a tiny bit.
I was disappointed in the A770’s performance in Apex Legends, another favorite of mine,
where at 1440p on High, the RTX 3060 nudges it out for another win for team green,
and the A750 struggles to keep up at all. On low settings at 1440p,
the RTX 3060 approaches holding 144hz, meanwhile the A770 doesn’t really improve that much.
Let’s bump it down to 1080p on Medium. Honestly,
the A770’s performance still didn’t change much, the A750 improved a little bit,
meanwhile the RTX 3060 and 2080 both basically hold 144hz pretty stable.
Clearly, Intel’s cards perform better on newer titles than older ones, as Intel’s own data in
their marketing showed. This is reflected in my Spider-Man Remastered test, 1440p high settings,
WITH Ray-Tracing on high, where the A770 actually slightly nudged out even the RTX
2080 and the A750 wasn’t even that far behind the RTX 3060. I was actually VERY impressed here.
In Ghostwire Tokyo, another DirectX12 title, with Ray-Tracing off, the A770
performed neck-in-neck with the RTX 2080, and even the A750 beat out Nvidia’s RTX 3060.
With Ray-Tracing on High, performance normalizes a bit as it hits HARD in this
game. A770 still nudges out the RTX 3060, but the A750 really falls short and the RTX
2080’s lead really grows here. Dropping RT to Low catches the A770 back up near the RTX
2080 and the 3060 not too far behind, but the A750 is still dragging behind.
All of this so far has been at native Resolution. With the launch of their dedicated graphics cards,
Intel also released their own AI upscaling technology, XeSS. I’ll leave it to our friends
at DigitalFoundry to get you fully caught up on how it compares visually, but GhostWire Tokyo
gives us our first look at how it stacks up to AMD’s FSR 2.0, Nvidia’s DLSS, and TSR upscaling.
All of these tests were still at 1440p High, with RT on High.
XeSS on the A770 outperforms every other upscaling methodology - with FSR 2.0 being a
close second - and absolutely destroys the RTX 3060 running DLSS, XeSS, FSR and TSR. All of
them. This is… REAL fast. Holy cow. If Intel can really lock that down with a bunch of DX12 titles,
it’s going to really give Nvidia and AMD a run for their money. Seriously. Spend that Intel money.
Spider-Man on the other hand, doesn’t have XeSS implemented yet, but it DOES have DLSS, FSR 2.0,
AND Insomniac’s own temporal interpolation tech. Here, with upscaling enabled and Ray-Tracing still
on high… the RTX 3060 still beats out the A770 across all upscaling modes. But it’s progress.
Drivers
All in all, the driver experience has been mostly fine. I’ve had a few instances when I’m DDU-ing
and swapping cards and reinstalling drivers where the Intel driver installation would fail,
or even hang - but I’ve had that with other GPUs too. I did have a single full system hang
when using Topaz Gigapixel on the A750, but that never happened again. Using Arc control, gaming,
all of it has been fairly smooth sailing - BUT I also didn’t really have any major issues with
the drivers for my A380 for the past couple months either, so maybe I’m in the minority.
For a synthetic benchmark, 3DMark’s Time Spy DirectX12 benchmark has both the A750 and A770
wiping the floor with both the RTX 3060 and RTX 2080, wildly enough. 3DMark also has a
XeSS performance test to show performance gains of Intel’s AI upscaling algorithm. For both A750
and A770 you gain about 50% performance, but XeSS running on Nvidia is only around 33 to 35% gains.
Of course, Nvidia could improve this with driver updates, but that’s where we’re at right now.
### Creative Apps
Gaming is cool and all, but what about creative work? Here, it’s just as mixed as gaming.
Using PugetBench by the wonderful Puget Systems, the RTX 3060 still beats out
the A770 in most of the testing scores, but playback and effects in Premiere actually
had the A770 performing a little better, same with 4K media playback in Resolve.
But the Nvidia cards were doomed to win, as CUDA is so powerful in video editing.
Exporting a basic Resolve project with a variety of source codecs, stabilization, color grading,
and some GPU-accelerated transitions, Intel’s H265 beats out the RTX 3060 and 2080 - so does their
AV1 encodes too, which Nvidia can’t do on released GPUs yet. This is, in part, thanks to the Hyper
Encode capabilities where your system can use both the dGPU and Intel iGPU to export H265 across both
parts. But Intel loses in H264 export time as Nvidia’s H264 encoders are just so damn fast.
In Adobe Photoshop, the 3060 beats Intel’s offering in the Overall
score and in Filter processing, but the A770 actually wins on GPU score and the
“General” processing score - beating out even the RTX 2080 in those categories.
This seriously impressive photo editing performance continues into other apps.
In Lightroom classic, the A770 doesn’t win every score, but in many of the actual tasks,
like building smart previews, merging panoramas and HDR composites,
and converting images to DNG the A770 just dominates.
I wanted to include my Affinity Photo benchmarks here, too, but it purely just wouldn’t launch
on the Intel GPUs. I think they need to update it for compatibility first. Wellp.
What about AI? Both the A750 AND A770 absolutely blow the RTX cards out of the water with 42%
faster upscaling from 720p to 4K in Topaz Labs Video Enhance AI. I also tested to see if using
both the iGPU and dGPU would speed things up, but no that test was the slowest of the bunch.
Upscaling in Topaz Gigapixel is not a win for Intel, however, with the Nvidia RTX
3060 and 2080 beating Intel’s cards a decent bit.
Topaz’s new AI upscaling app, however, PhotoAI is a complete wash for Nvidia,
with Intel’s cards taking only about half as long as Nvidia to upscale, with Nvidia’s cards weirdly
performing almost as slow as just straight CPU processing or iGPU on the 12900k. I ran this
multiple times across multiple reinstalls, results kept coming out the same. Wild.
I also wanted to test Handbrake to show export times for a 4K video in H264, H265 and AV1 on
the slowest quality presets. This turned out to not be an apples-to-apples comparison,
as NVENC has many more quality settings than QuickSync - and on both Slowest and
Slow (which is skipping a tier), NVENC was still slower than QuickSync. But
this isn’t a full representation of NVENC’s maximum encoding capability.
Of course, I can’t cover all of this without reminding you that these GPUs
do come with AV1 encoding - a new open source video codec with insane quality at
low bitrates. I’ve covered both this and the H264 and H265 quality on these GPUs
in a full dedicated video here: But needless to say, it’s incredible. THAT BEING SAID,
don’t buy one of these for a dedicated encoding card, the A380 is all you need for that.
### Arc Control
Arc Control, Intel’s software suite for the GPUs akin to Nvidia’s GeForce Experience,
is an awesome start, but needs some work. Driver management is not really present,
instead offloaded to the separate Intel Driver & Support Assistant. It has some basic recording
and highlights capabilities, but it’s very limited. It’s not great at the moment. You
can choose to record in H.264 or HEVC, but you’re very limited on bitrates, and you cannot record
60FPS at any resolution above 1080p. I don’t understand why. Plus, it doesn’t auto-name
files based on game name, instead expecting you to manually name files each time you hit record.
Highlights are supported, but it’s completely
unclear as to what games are supported, what qualifies as a highlight, and so on.
And, of course, I encountered the random bug where it would continuously capture
my second monitor instead of my game for some reason. This was a problem
for Shadowplay too, of course, and might still be.
Like I said, it’s a fantastic start, and I look forward to it getting updates.
There’s also some performance tuning you can try
out, similar to what Nvidia added to GeForce Experience.
This has been a wild and rough past week or so, my kid’s been sick so I
didn’t get to benchmark anywhere near as much as I wanted to - BUT these GPUs are
a wild ride and I’m incredibly stoked for Intel to keep this train rolling,
see if they can get their DX11 performance up, and maybe keep going toe to toe on DX12.
If you’re going toe-to-toe with your desk aesthetic,
pick up one of my blank VHS cover-style desk mats at eposvox.gg/merch. You’re
really missing out on crucial encoding information, though, so make sure you
click over to this video about Intel’s hardware AV1 encoder, and remember to be kind, rewind.