Intel Shows First High-End Arc Benchmarks, Alleged Pricing Also Leaks

Although Intel won’t be releasing its high-powered Arc discrete graphics in the US for a few more months, its PR rep is already making the rounds. Intel’s Ryan Shrout posted a short video to YouTube giving us the first benchmarks for its high-end A750 Limited Edition GPU. Like any company doing pre-launch marketing, Intel is obviously picking games that show their card in a good light. Still, we at least get a peek of the card, and can gain an idea of what it’s capable of doing in AAA titles. Alleged pricing for the entire series has also leaked.

Intel posted a short blog along with a brief video showing benchmarks in several popular titles. This is the first in a series of videos the company plans to release on Arc and its relative performance. The Arc A750 LE Intel is discussing today is one rung below the company’s A770 flagship. The A750 LE is rumored to be a 225W GPU with 8GB of memory, while the A770 is expected to ship with 16GB of VRAM. In the video, the A750 Limited Edition is shown with one eight-pin and one six-pin PCIe power connector. Shrout is shown running the benchmark for Cyberpunk 2077 at “high” settings at 1440p. Sadly, there’s no mention of ray tracing or Intel’s XeSS super-sampling. Still, he shows the card averaging 60fps, so it’s obviously rather playable.

Shrout then shared a benchmark chart. It shows the relative performance of the A750 compared to Nvidia’s RTX 3060. For reference, the RTX 3060 has an MSRP of $329 and is a midrange, 1080p/1440p GPU with 8GB of memory. The blog adds this disclaimer, “Performance results shown here are from a small subset of the games, that work very well with Intel® Arc™ and the Alchemist architecture. I’m not asserting that ALL GAMES will show these results, but it’s a view of what Intel Arc A-series cards are capable of with the right software and engineering enablement.”

It’s pretty clear it’s a decent card for 1440p gameplay, at least in the games Intel listed. As Shrout notes, the key words here at the right games with the right software. We don’t know yet if Resizable BAR will improve A750 performance or what the card can do in ray tracing workloads. We also don’t know how much of an impact XeSS will have on performance or how widely the feature will be supported. It may take Intel 12-24 months to build support for its own upscaling solution. Nvidia has a ~4 year headstart with XeSS and AMD has had FSR in market for several years as well.

Of course, performance is one thing, but at what price? According to Wccftech, the A750 will be roughly $300. The 16GB A770 will be offered with the same 225W TBP, but the extra RAM will raise the cost to around $399. The decidedly midrange 175W A580 with 8GB will land somewhere in the $200 to $299. Below that it’s just the A380 “mainstream” GPU which we were disappointed by previously. Overall, that’s competitive pricing. Now we’ll just have to see what kind of quantity is available when they launch.

The big question surrounding Intel’s discrete GPUs isn’t what the hardware is intrinsically capable of. If Intel wasn’t capable of building competitive hardware, it wouldn’t have advanced this far in the process. The big question is drivers and what the software package will look like. It’s been reported previously Intel was struggling with drivers for Arc. It’s also going up against companies with mature and robust software suites. Stability and performance will be crucial in determining Intel’s success in this market. The company previously stated Arc desktop would launch “later this summer,” which is coming up soon.

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