News Intel Drops Arc A750 Price to $249, With Improved Drivers

[Admin]

Intel has dropped the official price of the Arc A750 to $249, and shows continued performance improvements thanks to driver updates.

Intel Drops Arc A750 Price to $249, With Improved Drivers : Read more

 

[zodiacfml]

Exactly as I said on LTTs last Intel Arc video. They have to match the RX 6600 in price as it is as fast or faster at lower TDPs. But now A750 wins for me as it has AV1 encoding

 

[KyaraM]

This certainly the card more attractive for lower-end builds! The driver updates also show that they are dedicated to work on them and improve as much as possible. Btw, Mindfactory says they sold about 65 750s, 60 Asrock and five Limited Edition cards, for what those statistics are are worth. It's only a single store, sadly, and they only officially sell in Germany. Most sold was the 380 with over 200 and then the 770 with 40 is last, btw.

 

[InvalidError]

If the A750 is down to $250, then the A580 would have to be $200 at most to make any sense. That would leave the rumored A5[56]0 about half-way between the A380 and A580.

I doubt the desktop A5xx would be economically viable without a DG2-256 refresh to save ~150sqmm per die and almost double yield per wafer.

Most sold was the 380 with over 200 and then the 770 with 40 is last, btw.

People wanting a worthwhile sub-$200 current-gen GPU upgrade like me are likely far more numerous than AMD, Nvidia and Intel would like, just as the Steam survey suggests. I'm not surprised at all that Intel's A380 appears to be the most popular option. If my GTX1050 decided to blow up today, I would probably get an A380 too unless my friend who still does crypto-mining in winter for heating offers me a really good price for one of his GPUs.

 

[horsemama]

If the A750 is down to $250, then the A580 would have to be $200 at most to make any sense. That would leave the rumored A5[56]0 about half-way between the A380 and A580.

I doubt the desktop A5xx would be economically viable without a DG2-256 refresh to save ~150sqmm per die and almost double yield per wafer.


People wanting a worthwhile sub-$200 current-gen GPU upgrade like me are likely far more numerous than AMD, Nvidia and Intel would like, just as the Steam survey suggests. I'm not surprised at all that Intel's A380 appears to be the most popular option. If my GTX1050 decided to blow up today, I would probably get an A380 too unless my friend who still does crypto-mining in winter for heating offers me a really good price for one of his GPUs.

Even on PCIE 3, RX 6500 XT is a better option over the A380 and the rx 6400 if you need low profile. The software on Intels side is just not there.

 

[InvalidError]

Even on PCIE 3, RX 6500 XT is a better option over the A380 and the rx 6400 if you need low profile. The software on Intels side is just not there.

I wouldn't spend over $120 on a GPU with only 4GB of VRAM in 2023. And the RX6500 is a no-go for me even if I got one for free since I need at least three video outputs.

 

[PEnns]

Any company that can put a hint of fear into the pocket books of AMD and Nvidia is fine in my book.

I hope Intel throws serious money and effort at their GPU products. The rewards could be quite respectable.

 

[PlaneInTheSky]

Soemone should test an obscure DirectX9 title to find out if these optimisations are game-specific for well-known titles, or if the overall DirectX9 support is improved accross the board.

Anyway, good job driver team, those are massive improvements.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Soemone should test an obscure DirectX9 title to find out if these optimisations are game-specific for well-known titles, or if the overall DirectX9 support is improved accross the board.

Anyway, good job driver team, those are massive improvements.

They're almost certainly game specific in most cases, though it's possible some apply to a wider range of games. Testing older and less known DX9 games to look for driver improvements is unfortunately a rather time consuming process with not much reward. I'll have to see if there's something quick I could do with a game not in the charts, though.

 

[InvalidError]

Soemone should test an obscure DirectX9 title to find out if these optimisations are game-specific for well-known titles, or if the overall DirectX9 support is improved accross the board.

To me, it doesn't seem like it would make much sense to focus on game-specific optimizations until the low-hanging generic fruits are sorted out, so I'd expect a good chunk of gains to apply across the board.

For example, Intel is touting a major driver bottleneck breakthrough in its newest update with its presentation graphs showing massive improvements in frame time consistency with variance reduced by 50+% across most of the board. That can be expected to have substantial repercussion across all titles that hit those bottlenecks and that may even include titles running legacy API translation.

 

[RichardtST]

Now we're talking! I'll get one for the office and see if it runs Minecraft Java/OpenGL. If it does, kudos. If not, shame. Saw some charts showing that Radeon has finally fixed their MC problems, so am dying to test that too...

 

[Eximo]

I'll try with my A380 again this evening. I originally tried out Sid Meier's Pirates as a DX9 test. It worked but had severe stuttering whenever anything substantial happened. DX12 stuff I tried worked pretty well.

 

[JamesJones44]

Any company that can put a hint of fear into the pocket books of AMD and Nvidia is fine in my book.

I hope Intel throws serious money and effort at their GPU products. The rewards could be quite respectable.

100% this. I just want more than 2 competitions in this space, I could care less who those competitors are, just as long as they are competitive and help hold prices down.

 

[InvalidError]

100% this. I just want more than 2 competitions in this space, I could care less who those competitors are, just as long as they are competitive and help hold prices down.

In an oligopoly, you can have 5+ "players" tracking each other's value-per-dollar to ensure the market gets effectively no net competition while maximizing their profit, which is exactly what Intel tried with the A7xx which were priced about on par with the nearest equivalent RTX3xxx GPUs, minus a diminutive markdown for junk launch drivers and a bigger markdown on the A750 now, presumably due to atrocious sales beyond the initial curiosity and collectors bump.

 

[Kona45primo]

C'mon Intel! Keep on improving! I know you're taking it in the shorts right now, bad timing on your gpu launch, but we need you competing in this space! "Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group (AXG) lost $441 million amid $245 million in revenue, up 1% year-over-year."

 

[JamesJones44]

In an oligopoly, you can have 5+ "players" tracking each other's value-per-dollar to ensure the market gets effectively no net competition while maximizing their profit, which is exactly what Intel tried with the A7xx which were priced about on par with the nearest equivalent RTX3xxx GPUs, minus a diminutive markdown for junk launch drivers and a bigger markdown on the A750 now, presumably due to atrocious sales beyond the initial curiosity and collectors bump.

That usually only works when companies work together (which is technically illegal in most countries) or the products are in low innovation/stable businesses (telcos come to mind here). In industrial and tech that usually isn't the case because someone is always behind the leader, so they cut their prices while trying to catch up. Once they catch up the leader usually has to start cutting prices. This is playing right now in the automotive sector with EVs.

I'm not saying it won't happen here, but if you get more providers of GPU designs, the odds are prices will get held in check if they can be competitive with the leader (Nvidia in this case).

 

[InvalidError]

That usually only works when companies work together (which is technically illegal in most countries) or the products are in low innovation/stable businesses (telcos come to mind here). In industrial and tech that usually isn't the case because someone is always behind the leader, so they cut their prices while trying to catch up. Once they catch up the leader usually has to start cutting prices. This is playing right now in the automotive sector with EVs.

You don't see competition driving down the prices on major brand phones, GPUs, telecom services, most online services, etc. despite "heaps of competition" because they are each creating their own walled garden flavor to create captive audiences to jack up prices on. You don't see banks competing against each other either, you get more or less the same fee structures no matter where you go. You have the oligopoly of normalized prices where the major players have captured the market and captured the market's regulators, keeping any meaningful new competition out of the market and not having any desire to trigger a price war by rocking the boat.

In the tech sector, much of that is achieved by patenting the heck out of often trivial aspects of devices and services (ex.: end-of-list bounce animation, rounded corners, whatever-you-used-to-do-over-phone-but-over-IP, whatever-you-used-to-do-IRL-but-in-an-app, etc.) so nobody else who doesn't already own a boatload of similar patents they could contest yours with can do anything similar.

 

[shady28]

They're almost certainly game specific in most cases, though it's possible some apply to a wider range of games. Testing older and less known DX9 games to look for driver improvements is unfortunately a rather time consuming process with not much reward. I'll have to see if there's something quick I could do with a game not in the charts, though.

Actually a re-review of something like the 750 might be worthwhile now. The claims go well beyond DX9.

Just a thought, to see if the Intel driver aging theory is playing out. Anecdotally it does seem to be.

These are the supposed numbers :

Intel ‘4086’ driver claims (Arc A750):

• 1080p Avg FPS: Up to 77% improvement
• 1080p 99th Percentile Normalized: Up to 114% improvement
• 1440p Avg FPS: Up to 87% improvement
• 1440p 99th Percentile Normalized: Up to 123% improvement
• Aggregate DX9 FPS improvement: 43%
• Aggregate DX9 99th Percentile improvement: 60%

 

[SyCoREAPER]

Wow. Proper framerates in DX9 games. The same DX9 launched in 2002? Intel overhyped their GPU and is now sitting on stock they can't get rid of.

** slow confused clap **

I wouldn't be so critical of their cards had they not oversold what they'd be capable of and underdelivered.

 

[Eximo]

Well the newest driver has made some improvements, but not so much on the games I tried running. Bear in mind that the system I have it plugged into doesn't support ReBar.

Sid Meier's pirates was basically zero improvement. still extreme stutters and overall poor performance. I believe it is a DX9.0c title. I fired up an old DX7 title and that worked almost perfectly, was some odd discoloration when there was lighting effects in the background and the menu was on top. (Not sure I should blame Intel on that one, it is an old game that really shouldn't run in Windows 10) Don't have much else in the way of old games on there at the moment. I have some old EA collections laying around with I'm sure a lot of DX9 titles.

Arc Overlay is indeed gone, and a more traditional taskbar application is in its place.

 

[JamesJones44]

You don't see competition driving down the prices on major brand phones, GPUs, telecom services, most online services, etc. despite "heaps of competition" because they are each creating their own walled garden flavor to create captive audiences to jack up prices on. You don't see banks competing against each other either, you get more or less the same fee structures no matter where you go. You have the oligopoly of normalized prices where the major players have captured the market and captured the market's regulators, keeping any meaningful new competition out of the market and not having any desire to trigger a price war by rocking the boat.

In the tech sector, much of that is achieved by patenting the heck out of often trivial aspects of devices and services (ex.: end-of-list bounce animation, rounded corners, whatever-you-used-to-do-over-phone-but-over-IP, whatever-you-used-to-do-IRL-but-in-an-app, etc.) so nobody else who doesn't already own a boatload of similar patents they could contest yours with can do anything similar.

Banks most definitely compete, you can get a loan for far less than you can get a loan at a Chase Bank or an Bank Of America, etc. You can also get savings rates way way higher than the 0.2% you get at those banks. SoFi for example, which isn't even the best example, will get you far better loan rates and interest rates. You can get an equivalent of an iPhone from 100s of Android providers that will change $500. Heck even the Google Pixel lineup is cheaper than equivalent iPhone models.

Where this fails is the App Stores, where again, you only have 2 players and thus the rules you laid out apply.

 

[InvalidError]

You can get an equivalent of an iPhone from 100s of Android providers that will change $500. Heck even the Google Pixel lineup is cheaper than equivalent iPhone models.

Apple has a bunch of interdependent stuff in its ecosystem that make migration away from its walled garden far more painful than most others, though they are all doing their best to setup walled garden ecosystems of their own to duplicate Apple's success there. The only people who can freely jump from any random device to the next are those who never cared about flagships' vendor-specific perks in the first place.

 

[KyaraM]

GN uploaded a benchmark video 12h ago. The verdict is quite favorable.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-6sHUNBxVg

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Your experience with the old vs. new drivers is going to be massively game dependent. Do you play a bunch of older DX9 games? It will probably be great. My relatively modern test suite, on the other hand, did not see much difference. I just finished testing on a 12900K and ASRock Arc A770 8GB, with the launch 3490 drivers and the latest public 4091 drivers. Results for now look like this (the left card is 4091 drivers, right card is 3490):





Things can also vary by the GPU, like for example Red Dead Redemption 2 currently has problems with the Arc A750 when using the Vulkan API — it has repeatedly caused my 12900K and 13900K test PCs to restart Windows, with the 3490 drivers doing better but still occasionally causing a restart. I have not had time to test and retest the A380, A750, and A770 16GB though.

 

[bit_user]

Mindfactory says they sold about 65 750s, 60 Asrock and five Limited Edition cards, for what those statistics are are worth. It's only a single store, sadly, and they only officially sell in Germany. Most sold was the 380 with over 200 and then the 770 with 40 is last, btw.

Over what time period?