Intel is about to release a pair of high-end Arc A7 graphics cards, and Team Blue will also tell us some home truths about these GPUs, including how performance will stack up against Nvidia.
All of this comes from recent interviews conducted by Computer game equipment (opens in a new tab) (German technical side) i Digital foundry (opens in a new tab) (Eurogamer), starring Tom Petersen and Ryan Shrout (as VideoCardz (opens in a new tab) Marked with a flag).
Intel shared some interesting things about what is happening with Arc desktop GPUs, confirming that the next Alchemist graphics cards to hit the market – the high-end A770 and A750 – will join the budget A380 already available – will be here. very soon ”so maybe later this month.
At the same time, there will be Intel reference cards available directly from the Team Blue website. The premiere will cover the “key” countries, one of which will be Germany (so this time it will not be Asia, but for a long time).
When the flagship A770 if The debut will be positioned at an approximate level of performance between the Nvidia RTX 3060 and 3060 Ti graphics cards, with the A750 being roughly the equivalent of the RTX 3060.
Of course, as Petersen points out in an interview with Digital Foundry, the type of performance you get will vary greatly depending on a number of factors (with one notable element being the inferior performance on DX11 titles, which has been talked about a lot). recently compared to DX12 or Vulkan). But these are still the approximate performance guidelines to be expected (by the way, on the AMD front we’re talking about halfway between the Radeon RX 6600 and the RX 6650 XT for the A770).
Another topic that has been tackled in terms of performance is the heavy reliance of Intel Arc GPUs on ReBAR (Resizable BAR, a PCIe feature that allows the CPU to gain full access to GPU memory to significantly increase FPS). There is a known problem with older computers that do not support ReBAR technology, and Intel rejects driver optimization to help those systems that suffer from a fairly large loss of performance on Arc graphics processors due to the lack of this feature.
Analysis: Intel’s refreshing approach that gives us hope
What’s refreshing about these nuggets donated by Intel is Petersen honesty. For example, we just mentioned this thorny issue with ReBAR support, and while Intel is indeed working on optimizing for older PCs in this regard, for now, Petersen is advising these users to simply use rivals Intel, AMD, or Nvidia. This kind of open and honest commentary is the topic of the interviews being carried out here, which is worth seeing.
Petersen openly admits that when it comes to delaying the Arc GPU on desktops, while there were some delivery issues that held it back, the issues were mainly in ensuring game compatibility and a good buyers’ experience. And yes, with thousands of popular games out there, it’s always going to be a headache.
Intel, of course, must have known about this, but reading between the lines may have been a much bigger headache than anticipated, hence the protracted delays.
It’s also clarified here that Arc graphics card performance levels won’t match the significant gains from further tweaking graphics drivers, but we can expect much better compatibility across a range of games and a better overall experience – that’s mostly what Intel is trying to achieve right now.
The result is that Intel will not raise the stakes in terms of performance, and with the arrival of next-gen GPUs for AMD and Nvidia on the horizon, the temperature of competition in the graphics card arena will soon increase – seriously. The suggestion is that Intel can compete on price, and that’s what we’re counting on – some A7 series desktop GPUs that are affordable to match competing products.
Petersen also emphasizes that Intel does not only do this for a year, several years, or even a decade – it wants to be a player in the graphics card space for a long, long time, and as the months go by, we can expect these drivers to be more and more polished and in better overall shape.
While Arc Alchemist’s launch has been quite disappointing so far, what’s not disappointing is Intel’s approach, and that gives us hope for a brighter, more competitive GPU world where three players are battling rather than a duopoly.