Intel today officially announces the awards for its best Arc graphics card. The premium Arc A770 will arrive on October 12, starting at $329. This price matches that of Nvidia’s RTX 3060, a card the A770 is expected to comfortably outperform.
“We’ve seen the price of GPUs well in the $200-$300 range for a long time, but what’s happened in recent years is that they’ve gotten super expensive,” said Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger. “You should be frustrated because you’re losing it as a gaming community, and today we’re solving that.”
The A770 will include: up to 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, a clock speed of 2100 MHz and 32 Xe cores. Intel hasn’t released full benchmarks for the A770 yet, but it is what shared recent results showing that the A770 outperforms the RTX 3060 in ray-traced games at 1080p. Intel now says it will have 65 percent better ray tracing performance compared to “the competition.” Rumors suggest it could have performance between the RTX 3060 Ti and the RTX 3070 at 1440p, but we’ll have to see independent benchmarks to find out.
Image: Intel
When we reviewed the RTX 3070 two years ago, we called it the sweet spot for 1440p, so it’ll be interesting if Intel can get close to the $329 Nvidia performance instead of the RTX’s $499 retail price. 3070.
Now that we have a date for Intel’s best Arc GPU, we’re still waiting for more information on the rest of the Arc line. Intel released 48 benchmarks last month showing that the upcoming Arc A750 GPU, which is slightly less powerful than the A770, should be able to pack a punch with Nvidia’s RTX 3060 with modern games. Intel initially set its expectations low for its Arc GPUs, but the company has tested its A750 directly against the RTX 3060 in 42 DirectX 12 titles and six Vulkan games, and it seems to perform well.
We’ll have to wait for independent reviews, but Intel says A770 cards are now going to reviewers, so expect to hear more about benchmarks soon. Until then, the Arc A770 will be available on October 12 for $329.
