Intel Arc top of the range, a test seems to confirm the predictions: at the level of the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti

In a gaming video card market ravaged by shortage and mining purchases that drive prices up, there are many enthusiasts looking to enter the industry. Intel as a possible return to normal.

Certainly legitimate hopes, but perhaps misplaced, as gaming GPUs are produced by TSMC and are subject to the supply chain involving AMD and NVIDIA. Hoping to be wrong, the other element of waiting is the performance: in general, if the competition is strong, it is consumers who benefit.

So far all the rumors that have emerged in these long months of waiting, interrupted by Intel only to talk to us in broad terms about the architecture of the new GPUs, have given us a rather clear picture, with Intel that it would be ready to offer. maximum performance between the RTX 3070 and the RTX 3080, which is where NVIDIA placed last summer the RTX 3070 Ti.

To corroborate those rumors there is a test, appeared in the SiSoftware Sandra database, relative to the very top of the range, a card that should have a Alchemist GPU with 512 EU and 16 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus. The TDP should go up to 225W according to insiders.

Tested on a platform with Coffee Lake CPU, the board is slightly ahead of the RTX 3070 Ti depending on the test, while in others it is below. The overall “score” sees the Intel solution at 9017.52 Mpix / s, 7.7% more than the 8369.51 Mpix / s be marked by the proposal of NVIDIA.

It is perhaps no coincidence that several times there has been rumors of an NVIDIA about to introduce an RTX 3070 Ti with double the memory, thus going from 8 to 16 GB. Obviously, although interesting, the test should be taken with a little caution, as there are several obscure points: the indicated frequency of 2.1 GHz we do not know if it is true or not, moreover we must not forget the impact of the drivers. At the moment, however, the performance objective indicated by the rumors so far seems to be confirmed, but if Intel were to be able to do better we would certainly not complain.

There is still no clarity on the release of Intel Arc dedicated video cards. At CES 2022, Intel said mobile and desktop GPUs are shipping to OEMs ahead of a first quarter debut. However, it is not clear whether this also applies to the retail market.

Read also: Arc A380, A350 and more: Intel leaks the names of the video cards before the debut