Review Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition Review: Bringing Back Midrange GPUs

[Admin]

The Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition proves that Intel actually has the potential to compete with the likes of AMD and Nvidia in graphics cards. It delivers a compelling alternative for the $349 asking price, with plenty of forward-looking features, though drivers continue to be a work in progress.

Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition Review: Bringing Back Midrange GPUs : Read more

 

[ingtar33]

When Intel can deliver drivers that don't crash simply opening a game i might be interested; however until the software side is figured out (something intel hasn't done yet in 20+ years of graphic drivers) I simply can't take this seriously.

 

[edzieba]

If you're getting a headache with all the nebulously-pronounceable Xe-ness (Xe-cores, Xe Matrix Engines, Xe kitchen sink...) imagine it is pronounced "Ze" in a thick Hollywood-German accent. Much more enjoyable.

 

[Deleted member 431422]

I'd like to see benchmarks cappped at 60fps. Not everyone uses high refresh rate monitor and today, when electricity is expensive and most likely will be even more in the near future, I'd like to see how much power a GPU draws when not trying to run the game as fast as possible.

 

[AndrewJacksonZA]

FINALLY, Intel is back! Or at least, halfway back. It's good seeing them compete in this midrange, and I hope that they flourish into the future.

And I really want an A770, my i740 is feeling lonely in my collection. ;-)

 

[AndrewJacksonZA]

If you're getting a headache with all the nebulously-pronounceable Xe-ness (Xe-cores, Xe Matrix Engines, Xe kitchen sink...) imagine it is pronounced "Ze" in a thick Hollywood-German accent. Much more enjoyable.

The "EKS-E" makes it sound cool!

 

[-Fran-]

Limited Edition? More like DoA Edition...

Still, I'll get one. We need a strong 3rd player in the market.

I hope AV1 enc/dec works! x'D!

EDIT: A few things I forgot to mention... I love the design of it. It's a really nice looking card and I definitely appreciate the 2 slot, not obnoxiously tall height as well. And I hope they can work as secondary cards in a system without many driver issues... I hope... I doubt many have tested these as secondary cards.

Regards.

 

[chalabam]

No tensorflow support on the age of AI?

 

[LolaGT]

The hardware is impressive. It looks the part, in fact that looks elegant powered up.

It does look like they are trying to push out fixes, unfortunately when you are swamped with working on fixes optimization takes a back seat. The fact that they have pushed out quite a few driver updates shows they are spending resources on that and if they keep at that.....we'll see.

 

[AndrewJacksonZA]

I hope AV1 enc/dec works!

Same. I have a BOATLOAD of media that I want to convert and rip to AV1, and my i7-6700 non-K feels sloooooowwww, lol.

 

[rluker5]

Looks like this card works best for those that want to max out their graphics settings at 60 fps. Definitely lagging the other two in driver CPU assistance.
And a bit of unfortunate timing given the market discounts in AMD gpu prices. The 6600XT for example launched at AMD's intended price of $379. The A770 likely had it's price reduced to account for this, but the more competitors you have, generally the more competition you will have.

I wonder how many games the A770 will run at 4k60 medium settings but high textures? That's what I generally play at, even with my 3080 since the loss in visual quality is worth it to reduce fan noise.

 

[rluker5]

When Intel can deliver drivers that don't crash simply opening a game i might be interested; however until the software side is figured out (something intel hasn't done yet in 20+ years of graphic drivers) I simply can't take this seriously.

I would recommend upgrading your processor to something that officially supports SAM first. My A380 1. games like trash on my h97 and h81 motherboards and 2. won't install Arc Control on either of those. If you tried the A770 on your 2700 you would likely get crashes and poor performance like you are expecting. The lack of rebar issues for Arc are much more severe than lacking SAM capability or rebar with Nvidia.

 

[-Fran-]

I would recommend upgrading your processor to something that officially supports SAM first. My A380 1. games like trash on my h97 and h81 motherboards and 2. won't install Arc Control on either of those. If you tried the A770 on your 2700 you would likely get crashes and poor performance like you are expecting. The lack of rebar issues for Arc are much more severe than lacking SAM capability or rebar with Nvidia.

Intel has already clarified ARC does work on systems that don't have ReBAR (it's not SAM; that's AMD branding of ReBAR) and what you're facing are just issues of the craptastic state of Intel drivers.

Regards.

 

[-Fran-]

Same. I have a BOATLOAD of media that I want to convert and rip to AV1, and my i7-6700 non-K feels sloooooowwww, lol.

I just want to toy around with how bad ARC seems to be right now, as I don't have a big library of stuff that I'd like converting or re-encoding to AV1. I'll swap my Vega64 and daily drive the ARC for a while... Well, if I can find it anywhere.

Regards.

 

[peachpuff]

Honestly shocked 👏👏👏

 

[Giroro]

Does memory bandwidth have a meaningful effect on encoding performance?

 

[tek-check]

Is it really "midrange"? Hardware Unboxed review paints even lower tier picture...

 

[bolweval]

I think I'll pick up an Arc 770 16g, I'll put it up in the closet for 20 years and then sell it on Ebay as a collectors item, "brand new unopened"

 

[salgado18]

Midrange contender for a few months, when it could go to entry-level when all the new cards arrive.

Anyway, it's the first shot, right? And a good one, I'd say. Now team red needs to step up their raytracing performance and we will finally have a leveled competition between them.

 

[-Fran-]

Indeed it's been a long winding road with Intel having re-entered the dedicated GPU market. For me it was good to see that the ARC in its first official appearance stacked-up relativity well. It was further a delight to see that the ‘naysayers’ where all proven to be wrong and having published many previous articles that the new Intel foray into the dedicated GPU market had actually died. What I liked most about the Intel ARC program is that it is owned by a U.S company with extremely deep pockets. I am most certainly not worried if Intel can keep iterating on the drivers or delivering on the follow-up and additional development of the product. Intel already invested over $1-Billion (CAPEX) into their new dedicated graphics program and will undoubtedly becoming a serious competitor. I now recall PM Churchill of Britain remarking during the stormy island seas of WWII: “It is he who has the biggest checkbook will win the war.” Besides Intel has now one less thing to worry about as well...and that is the eventual invasion of Taiwan by the Chinese communistic government!

Er... ARC is made in TSMC... And they've contracted N6 and N5 for Battlemage and, maybe, Druid. They haven't mentioned using internal fabbing capacity for ARC either.

Regards.

 

[InvalidError]

Is it really "midrange"? Hardware Unboxed review paints even lower tier picture...

Can't really call it anything lower than mid-range when you look at what the compettition's sub-$200 options are. The A750 and A770 are waaaaay faster than the RX6500 and GTX1650.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Does memory bandwidth have a meaningful effect on encoding performance?

Not that I could tell. The A380 ripped through video encoding quite nicely. When I get a chance, I'll verify that nothing has changed, but the encoder block is fixed function hardware. I know that with Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti and GTX 1650 Super (both using the same 7th Gen NVENC), FFmpeg encoding rates were identical and so was quality (within like 0.5% of each other).

 

[rluker5]

Intel has already clarified ARC does work on systems that don't have ReBAR (it's not SAM; that's AMD branding of ReBAR) and what you're facing are just issues of the craptastic state of Intel drivers.

Regards.

That is what I said in the post you quoted for this.
I don't know why you are disagreeing.
I have a A380 and have tried it on z690,b660,h97, and h81 motherboards. The initial reviews of the A380 also demonstrated this.

 

[-Fran-]

That is what I said in the post you quoted for this.
I don't know why you are disagreeing.
I have a A380 and have tried it on z690,b660,h97, and h81 motherboards. The initial reviews of the A380 also demonstrated this.

You attributte bad performance and crashes to the lack of support of ReBAR. That is incorrect, factually at least, to the crashes. Bad performance, well, you have a A380, so it didn't have much performance to begin with*, so hard to gauge the deltas in such old hardware.

Regards.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Do you know what? This is a decent entry into the GPU mainstream.

All the neysayers, have nothing else to grumble about.

Sure, drivers can be improved, and I'm sure will be. That aside, these GPU's particularly the 770 really hold up to exactly what Intel said they would. Pretty decent perfroamcne allround.

On the whole ,DX11 and older game compatibility, well.....c'mon, move with the times. Whilst 'some' gamers might want to play older games, most PC gamers (as long as hardware provides) will likely be looking at current games and how they perform. And these GPU's seem to perform pretty well in that respect.

I like the fact that with this first roll out, Intel outpefroms AMD with it's 2nd Gen RT. Nice.

Hopefully Battlemage will bring further improvements, and really push AMD/Nvidia harder on the mid to high end.