Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition, here are the first tests: better not to play DirectX 11 titles

After confirming the existence of the Arc A770 Limited EditionIntel and LinusTechTips gave one first public demonstration, albeit limited. Intel’s Ryan Shrout and Tom Petersen talked about what is the fastest card of this first generation Arc, powered by an ACM-G10 GPU with 32 Xe-cores, 32 ray-traced units and up to 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on 256-bit bus.

As far as performance is concerned, a recently leaked slide showed us how the Arc A770 points to compete with RTX 3060 Ti and Radeon RX 6650 XT in the range under $ 399.

At the moment, as explained by Petersen, they exist three tiers to define the degree of optimization of Arc GPUs with video games. The first level refers to titles that work very well with Arc GPUs, the second includes games that are less optimized but based on modern APIs such as DirectX12 and Vulkan, and the third refers to those games where Arc GPUs perform poorly and they correspond to titles based on API DirectX 11 or earlier. The last category includes a rather large stock of titles, so much so that the five most popular games on Steam are based on DirectX 11/9.

Intel Arc A750 Limited Edition faster than GeForce RTX 3060 in five games

The good news is that, according to Peterssen, Intel will set the price of Arc video cards based on tests with games belonging to the third tier, therefore on non-optimized games. Consequently, Petersen believes that the price-performance ratio in Tier 1 games will be significantly better than the competition.

Not many numbers were shown during the video, except for F1 2021 and Tom Raider. In F1 2021 the card hit 180 FPS at the highest settings at 1440p. As for instead Tomb Raiderthe card managed to reach 80 FPS in DX 12 mode and approximately 40 FPS in DX 11 mode. The lack of optimization for the old API cuts performance in half, reflecting the great optimization work Intel has to do.

The card was also overclocked via the Arc Control control panel, setting a GPU Performance Boost profile of + 20% which acted on the frequency and voltage curve by raising the sustained clock, the power limit and the temperature limit. Even in this case, however, exact numbers have not been provided, even if in some screens you can see values ​​such as 2.5 GHz and 225W. By setting the profile to “+ 30%”, however, the card crashed.