There has been plenty of talk about $1000+ graphics cards lately, but I want to dial
things back a bit to a more common price point.. Intel”s Arc A770 has not only hit
the market but also keeps coming back in stock regularly on Newegg and Microcenter.
At $349 for the Limited Edition model, which packs a massive 16GB frame buffer, there are a
lot of eyes on Intel’s foray into the dedicated gaming graphics card space. Now that it’s been
on the market for over a month I think it’s a good time to check in and see how it’s doing.
“But Keith, the reviews for the A770 were done A MONTH AGO and we know how it performs!” Sure,
the reviews were done, and we even have one on our site where Brad dug into a lot
of different performance metrics. But there’s a lot of speculation that driver advancements
and time will be generous to the Arc A770 more so than other GPUs on the market and
THAT is what I want to track. Together over the coming months you and I are going to
find out if Raja brought that ‘fine wine’ mentality with him, and whether or not the
A770 improves as time goes on. And if so, by how much. Now, this isn’t a re-review, and no
one on staff here at PCWorld is recommending anyone buy this card over others right now,
this video series is more of a science experiment than a buying guide. So if you want to be sure to
see future videos in this series please subscribe to PCWorld and smash the hell out of that bell,
every time you do Gordon thinks about how much he hates small form factor!
I’m well aware that there will be two moving targets here; game updates and driver updates,
and both just are what they are. I’m measuring improvements for the user and whether that comes
from the game or the driver or both is somewhat irrelevant to the total experience. The test
bench I’ll be using through this experiment will remain constant with a Ryzen 9 5900X,
32GB of DDR4 3600, on an X570 platform with ReBAR enabled. Something to keep in
mind is that the ‘Launch’ results will largely be borrowed from Brad’s review,
which is on the same operating system revision and hardware configuration I’m using.
Over the course of the next couple of months I’ll be tracking 8 titles consistently,
but I might end up adding some more in later as well. Admittedly these first 8 titles are all
relatively new games, which might be a benefit to the Arc lineup. Intel has tailored Arc to
play better out of the gate with newer APIs like DX12 and Vulkan, but I do have at least
one DX11 title in there right now and it’ll be interesting to follow that one closely.
I’ll start things off with Cyberpunk 2077 which looked pretty rough at launch,
and with the latest driver as of November 16th we see a small but
welcome 5% improvement at 1080p with Ultra settings. 1440p gave us the same 5% increase,
while it doesn’t show BIG FPS increases, it’s measurable and certainly an improvement.
Watch Dogs: Legion on the other hand tells a different story. We see a pretty big performance
drop at 1080p Ultra settings by about 5%. Thankfully at 1440p we only see a drop of 1%,
so there’s definitely something going on with the latest driver that is causing
this title to lose performance. I’m not sure what the culprit is,
but perhaps they can recapture that performance in a future driver. Either way,
it’s not a good look to LOOSE performance when playing a game over the course of a month.
Horizon Zero Dawn at 1080p Highest Quality settings yielded an impressive performance
gain of 10% - now this is an improvement I can get
excited about! But at 1440p we didn’t see the needle move at all, bummer.
Borderlands 3 tells a pretty boring story with 1080p badass settings staying flat.
There was a slight bump at 1440p, but 2 fps at that level of frame rate is
basically within the margin of error, so I’m going to count this game as a wash.
Total War: Troy is my lone DX11 title for now and where Arc cards struggle. But some magic was
done in the driver work here because at 1080p Ultra I measured a staggering 19% performance
increase. At 1440p we still saw a healthy 9% improvement, no sticks will be shaken at this.
Sure this is a sample size of 1, but a win is a win for DX11 so I’m happy about that.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a game that has been out so long we’re likely to only
see driver impact as the game is pretty much updated out. In DX12 with the highest settings,
we’re greeted with a boring story at 1080p with a flat response. But with this title,
120fps is more than sufficient and I would assume this one isn’t going
to improve over the course of this science experiment. It’s the same story at 1440p,
but again performance is overall smooth here, and nothing much to write home about.
Modern Warfare 2 wasn’t out at Arc’s launch, and rather than not having any initial numbers I used
the launch driver vs the latest driver here to see if there was a difference. At 1080p Ultra
there was a slight move of the needle but nothing to write home about. 1440p echoes that sentiment,
but both did see a slight bump and I can imagine some more gains in the future
I approached Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in the same manner, using the launch driver vs the
latest driver, and guess what? Same story. 1080p Very High gained a couple of FPS and 1440p was
right there with it with only a couple of FPS gain, but gains are gains am I right?
So there’s the first month in the bag, with one disappointing result, many flat ones, and a few
impressive gains. But that’s why I’m doing this, I want to see just how this card shakes out in
the coming months to see if that ‘fine-wine’ idea is here, because the hardware is quite
solid and it seems that the software is where improvements can be made. In a future video I’ll
be digging into the raw ray tracing performance, and that information should be rather interesting
and provide an idea of what is possible with the A770, so stay tuned for that one.
I plan on doing these updates for at least the next several months,
but time will tell how much is actually going to change. If you enjoyed this look at the Arc
Odyssey then make sure you like the video, leave a comment below with your take on the results,
and make sure you’re subscribed to PCWorld for even more PC gaming and hardware videos.