Intel Arc A770 Graphics

Product Information

First, a bit about what's inside the card. Intel has slated the Arc A770 to be its most powerful graphics card in the company’s first-gen Xe HPG graphics card line, based on the "Alchemist" architecture. All Arc A770 graphics cards feature an uncut 6nm CPU die that measures 406mm square.

The situation in Red Dead Redemption 2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider for the Arc A770 is identical to what we saw in Total War: Three Kingdoms. We did run an extra test with the Intel Arc A770 using XeSS, as this is one of the titles that will support XeSS at launch. But we don’t have DLSS and FSR ready for the competing cards in this title. Nonetheless, you can see that using XeSS gives the Arc A770 a considerable boost.

Our Graphics Card Test Setup

You're also getting three DisplayPort 2.0 outputs and an HDMI 2.1 output, which puts it in the same camp as Nvidia's recent GPUs, but can't match AMD's recent move to DisplayPort 2.1, which will enable faster 8K video output. As it stands, the Intel Arc A770 is limited to 8K@60Hz, just like Nvidia. Will you be doing much 8K gaming on a 16GB card? Absolutely not, but as we get more 8K monitors next year, it'd be nice to have an 8K desktop running at 165Hz, but that's a very speculative prospect at this point, so it's probably not anything anyone looking at the Arc A770 needs to be concerned about. We’ve not heard yet from any OEMs that will be producing Intel A770 graphics cards, but for the foreseeable future, Intel will be operating as a graphics card OEM, too. Its flagship is sold under the name “Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition,” but from what Intel tells us, this will not truly be a limited-run card; it will continue to be sold for some time. We hope so, as the card itself looks and feels quite well-made. That said, AMD and Nvidia cards would also benefit from this feature at least somewhat, so you could reasonably expect a few extra frames per second for those cards, had they been tested with Resizable BAR enabled. Though the synthetic test scores could show untapped potential in the graphics card that we aren’t currently seeing, for one reason or another, we can’t be sure we will ever see it perform specifically in gaming similar to how it did in these synthetic tests. We can be certain it won’t match its prowess in Furmark in games, as that would actually make it faster than our Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition! Intel’s Arc A770 Limited Edition graphics card clearly has a few rough areas that need to be smoothed over. Based on our limited tests with legacy titles, its performance in older games is not competitive in its price range; its idle power draw is too high; and its overall performance can vary a great deal from one game to the next.

John (He/Him) is the Components Editor here at TechRadar and he is also a programmer, gamer, activist, and Brooklyn College alum currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Intel is also pushing its XeSS technology, which utilizes AI hardware inside of the GPU to boost performance. This technology is similar to AMD’s FSR and Nvidia’s DLSS, and it’s used in much the same way in games. There are options to use XeSS to prioritize performance to get the most frames per second, while maintaining the best possible image quality. We were able to test this in just one title, Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, and we opted for the Balanced option there. You can see the test results in the charts coming up below. Gaming PCs Liquid Series® PCs Video Editing PCs Pro Audio Computers Professional Workstations Desktop PCs But taking the current performance results, and assuming we'd game at 1440p or 4K, this author would be highly tempted to buy one of these for personal use. Its current performance is good enough in recent games, and that large pool of RAM is hard to walk away from. Driver improvements and better consistency are still definitely needed, but the Arc A770 is a very promising card and may well improve like fine aged wine.

Verdict: A Flawed, But Surprisingly Promising, First Effort

But those decisions are not as cut and dry as you might think, and Intel's Arc A770 holds up very well against modern midrange offerings, despite really being a last-gen card. And, currently, the 16GB variant is the only 1440p card that you're going to find at this price, even among Nvidia and AMD's last-gen offerings like the RTX 3060 Ti and AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT. So for 1440p gamers on a very tight budget, this card fills a very vital niche, and it's really the only card that does so. As far as features all this hardware empowers, there's a lot to like here. The matrix cores are leveraged to great effect by Intel's XeSS graphics upscaling tech found in a growing number of games, and this hardware advantage generally outperforms AMD's FSR 2.0, which is strictly a software-based upscaler.

Configure a high performance Intel Arc 7 Based PC at PCSpecialist. Your perfect Intel Arc 7 Based PC is just a few simple steps away. While the 26 fps average minimum fps at 4K means it's really not playable at that resolution even with XeSS turned on, with settings tweaks, or more modest ray tracing, you could probably bring that up into the low to high 30s, making 4K games playable on this card with ray tracing turned on. Despite that, it still manages to be a fantastic value on the market right now given its low MSRP and fairly solid performance, rivaling the RTX 4060 Ti on the numbers. In reality though, with this card selling for significantly less than its MSRP, it is inarguably the best value among midrange cards right now, and it's not even close. The card feels like a well-made, premium card should, and it even has a ring of RGB LEDs that you can control by connecting the card to a USB 2.0 header on your motherboard. This model also has three DisplayPort 2.0 ports and a single HDMI 2.1 port.

The Not-So-Limited Arc A770 Limited Edition

Its maximum observed power draw of 191.909W is pretty high for the kind of card the A770 is, but it's not the most egregious offender in that regard. All this power meant that keeping it cool was a struggle, with its maximum observed temperature hitting about 74 ºC. These settings and others can be adjusted using Intel’s new Arc Control Center program. This program runs as an overlay when open, which prevented us from getting screenshots of it with our A770 card, but here's a look at the Performance section of the software, in use with the lower-end Arc A380...

Intel breaks up its architecture into "render slices", which contain 4 Xe Cores, which each contain 128 shaders, a ray tracing processor, and 16 matrix processors (which are directly comparable to Nvidia's vaunted tensor cores at least), which handle graphics upsampling and machine learning workflows. Both 8GB and 16GB versions of the A770 contain eight render slices for a total of 4096 shaders, 32 ray processors, and 512 matrix processors. According to Gelsinger, Intel heard complaints from gamers about the high prices. “You should be frustrated because you are losing out as a gaming community. And today, we’re fixing that." Enter Intel XeSS. When set to "Balanced", XeSS turns out to be a game changer for the A770, getting it an average framerate of 66 fps (with an average minimum of 46 fps) at 1080p, an average of 51 fps (with an average minimum of 38 fps) at 1440p, and an average 33 fps (average minimum 26 fps) at 4K with ray tracing maxed out.

Synthetic Benchmarks

my almost 10-year-old 980ti still has it's original fans and it's been used almost 12 hours a day every day.