- The only one more excited for this day
to come than me has got to be Intel.
They have been hard at work on their ARC series
dedicated GPU's since at least 2017
when they hired Raja Koduri from AMD
who was leading up their Radeon Graphics division.
And it's finally, freaking here.
This is their Alchemist, code name,
first generation ARC flagship, the A770.
And ooh, it comes with important safety
and regulatory information.
Neat.
Let's play, indeed.
It's a cute case badge.
Holy crap, this is it.
You gotta give them full credit.
It looks flipping sick.
Hold on, this plugs into a USB header
and this is going to handle the
RGB lighting on your graphics card.
That's right, a reference card with RGB.
What is this?
International power plugs.
Is this seriously a stand for the card?
Is that what it is, is it a sta-
Oh. Oh, I see.
Why does it come with two bases?
Wait, shut up. That's their solution?
To be able to wall mount it or wall mount it this way,
is to have two completely separate bases
with the power switch in a different spot.
- [Andy] All the engineers were on the graphics cards.
(exclaiming)
(laughing)
- Yeah.
They couldn't engineer a better solution
but you know what, fine.
Oh, fatal flaw, we got the top down camera
and I have no way of showing it to the top down, wait.
A solution.
(laughing)
Now the performance embargo hasn't lifted yet
but we can talk about all the detailed specs and Intel
has released enough performance information about this GPU
that we can make some pretty educated guesses.
First the basics though, the ARC lineup is divided
up into three, five, and seven series products
just like you would see on their desktop CPU's.
So this being an A770 makes it
the top performer of their top series.
It uses their DG2-512 processor, clocked at 2.1 gigahertz.
That means it has 32 of their Xe cores
and 32 ray-tracing units.
It's equipped with eight or 16 gigabytes of video memory.
That's what makes this the limited edition.
It has 16 gigs of memory and that's connected via
a 256 bit bus and it's rated to draw 225 watts of power.
Which is our first red flag because Intel says
that this card is designed to compete against
NVIDIA's RTX 3060 and AMD's Radeon RX 6650 XT,
both of which draw in the neighborhood of 160 to 170 watts.
Also, neither of which use a 256 bit memory bus.
That means that, especially once we dig in a little deeper,
and find the transistor count of this card that Intel
was hoping for better performance out of this GPU.
More along the lines of a 3070 or a 6700 class card.
Making matters more complicated for Intel,
NVIDIA has already announced their RTX 40 Series of cards.
However, NVIDIA's pricing is so far out to lunch
that if, at the price Intel has announced,
which is 330 dollars for this card, they do manage
to be competitive with a 3060, 3060 Ti.
And if the overclocking head room
is anywhere near what they've talked about,
ARC could actually end up being pretty competitive.
I guess we should take a closer look at the card.
Man, did they ever nail the aesthetics.
You've got a diffused RGB strip down here.
Diffused RGB lighting around both of the fans.
Man, in real life, once it's lit, it looks amazing.
Oh, do you have a test bench for me right there?
Bella Mans has got a test bench for me.
Hey, thank you.
- [Bell] You're so welcome.
- All right, let's just.
Yeah, what could go wrong?
Uh, that could go wrong.
One thing to note is that,
probably because it was intended to come out a lot sooner,
the ARC series does not use any of the new,
funky PCI-e power connectors, it just has a standard
eight pin plus six pin.
Oh, and that USB is right here.
Is that what that USB connector is for?
I thought I remember them telling me that it was for RGB,
but like, you're connected via PCI-e,
couldn't you just do it that way?
Can't wait to show this to you guys.
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Hey, there we go.
Does that look awesome, or what?
Of course, there's more to a GPU than just looks.
Starting with, is it even gonna fit in your case?
So we grabbed a couple of objects
that we can compare our A770 to.
Starting, of course, with our classic
short circuit banana for scale.
Eh, little something like that. Lttstore.com.
But, also some more useful things.
For context, here is a 3080 Ti.
It's the top tier flagship level card.
Hmm, it's pretty big.
It's almost as big as a 3080 Ti.
Here's a 3060 Ti.
This is more along the lines of
the kind of founder's edition card
that you might be competing with in terms of performance.
It's a little on the long boy side.
Here's our 6700 XT, which is actually, okay,
higher tier card than this and it's about the same size,
which, again, would give you some idea
of what Intel was actually targeting.
And you can see this in some of the other specs as well.
When we compared the raw pixel rate
and texture rate, memory bandwidth, with something
like a 3060 Ti, the A770 kind of craps all over it.
But, because Intel is kind of new to the driver game
when it comes to high performance dedicated GPU's,
it's speculated that aside from any architectural oversights
there might have been on a first gen product,
they have a lot to learn.
Especially when it comes to optimizing for older,
especially DirectX 9 and earlier titles.
And you can't not support them
because that's part of the beauty of PC gaming
is that you've got this incredible back catalog
of games that you can go back and play,
even on modern hardware.
Though, sometimes does take a little bit of hackery.
In spite of all the delays, one reassuringly modern thing
about this card is its feature set.
Intel is claiming that right out of the gate
they're going to have Ray-tracing performance that is
up to 65 percent stronger, peak, compared to their rivals.
Okay, so up to, peak.
That's a lot of qualifications, but,
hey, at least they're gonna support ray-tracing
right outta the gate and they're
gonna have support for Xe Super Sampling.
XESS, which is a competitor to
NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling
and AMD's Fidelity Effects Super Resolution.
Using AI to boost frame rates at higher resolutions.
How well it works though, remains to be seen
and based on how much work NVIDIA and AMD
have already put into this technology
I would say Intel is going to be playing catch up.
Where they won't be playing catch up
is in their display interfaces.
On the back here, we're going to find HDMI 2.1.
So you'll be able to do up to 4K 120 Hertz
or 8K 60 I believe, you can anything on 2.1.
And this is where things get really cool.
This is our first hands on with display Port 2.0.
However, unlike previous version of display Port,
DP 2.0 is not just a cut and dried, here's what you get.
It's divided up into ultra high bit rate,
UHBR 10, 13.5 I think, and 20.
And what those numbers mean is the data rate times four.
So these are DP 2.0 UHBR 10
for a total of 40 gigabit per second ports.
Okay. It's a little confusing.
Kind of wish it was just UHBR 40
so that that would be a little more intuitive for normies.
But, in a world where USB naming
conventions exist I guess this is a win.
(chuckling)
Another win, and another modern feature
is Intel Support for AV1 and coding.
And, not on this GPU, but we have actually played around
with it a fair bit in the last week
on Intel ARC on the A380 and it's pretty freaking cool.
At 3500 kilobit per second,
our encoded game streaming footage looks about the same
as NVIDIA's end bank at 6,000 kilobit per second.
So what this means is that once platforms like Twitch
support it, you can expect to be able to stream
at the same quality that people can today,
on a much lesser internet connection
or you can expect to see better quality Twitch streams.
Pretty cool.
For all my positivity, though.
And as much as I would love for there to be a valid
third competitor in the dedicated graphics card space,
I do have to temper my enthusiasm a little bit
because Intel is up against a lot of obstacles.
They've gotta figure out that backwards compatibility
game performance, they've gotta compete with
AMD and NVIDIA both releasing new series of GPU's when
ARC Alchemist was really supposed to be
competing with the last series of GPU's.
And another big one is that we talk about
second hand GPU's a lot and given the recent crypto crash
there's a lot of them out there at very aggressive pricing.
And the reality of it is that Intel doesn't have any used
GPU's and they certainly don't benefit from selling them.
So it's going to be an extremely competitive market.
They seem pretty confident in their 329 pricing
and I certainly wish them luck.
But, hey, if that doesn't work out for them,
then it can only be a win for gamers
because they've made them so now
they definitely have to sell them.
Just like I'm gonna sell you that you should
go subscribe to LTT while you're subscribing to
Short Circuit so you don't miss our full review
of this and other ARC Alchemist cards.