Mehul Robin DasMarch 13, 2023 at 20:19:16 IST
Positives:
– Continuous driver updates
– Consistent development to eliminate bugs
– Performance on DX12 and Vulkan APIs is much better than competitors
– Offer Price
Hardware-level AV1 video encoding
cons:
DX11 and DX9 games run fine, but the RTX 3060 trails a bit
Ray tracing capabilities need some improvement
– Intel Arc Control must be polished
– Lack of RGB might be “a bit boring for some people”
evaluation: 4.25/5
Pricing: Rs 23,800
NVIDIA has dominated the GPU market for years now. Yes, there are times when AMD comes out with a Radeon GPU every now and then that would pose a huge threat to NVIDIA’s GeForce GPUs back in the day, and now RTX series cards.
But more often than not, it won’t actually live up to the expectations that gamers and PC enthusiasts have. NVIDIA had practically no strong or reliable competition that would take it. And we all know when there’s no competition for tech companies. In terms of GPUs, we get products like the RTX 40 series cards.
When Intel launched the Arc A750 and A770 GPUs last year, tech enthusiasts were hoping that the latest entrants to the GPU market would take the fight to NVIDIA, bringing some kind of balance to the market. And while Intel’s GPUs managed to do this in certain situations, particularly in games that were based on DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs, it struggled in most games that were based on older APIs, such as DirectX 9 and DirectX 11.
Given that some of the most popular games of all time, which continue to find patrons to this day, are based on legacy APIs, Intel’s new GPUs, especially the Arc A750, have been overshadowed by things they weren’t designed for. instead of the abilities you already possess.
Six months later and with a host of driver updates, however, the Intel Arc A750 has a very different story to tell now. We take a look at why the Intel Arc A750 is a great choice for today’s mid-range GPU, and whether gamers looking to upgrade their systems or build a new one from scratch should consider Intel’s offerings via NVIDIA.
Intel Arc A750 GPU Review: Specifications and Features
Arc A750 Just like its older brother, the Arc A770 is based on Intel’s Alchemist architecture. It comes with 28 Xe cores, 28 ray tracing units, and is clocked at 2050MHz. The GPU comes with 8GB GDDR6 memory, 256-bit memory interface.
It connects to your PC using a PCIe Gen 4.0 X16 slot and 512GB bandwidth. Intel says the GPU has 225W of power draw, and because of that the GPU is equipped with 1X8-pin and 1X6-pin PCIe power ports.
Speaking of connecting to your PC, the Intel Arc series GPU is really for PCs that support ReBAR or Resizable BAR. It is one of the key features that allows Intel GPUs to stretch their legs and show how capable they are as graphics. The downside is that it’s not quite capable with pre-9th Gen Intel CPUs. We’ll explain this in a little detail later.
As for connectivity options, the Arc A750 has a wide range of ports for you to choose from. It has 3 Displayport 2.0 ports and an HDMI 2.1 port.
Intel designed the Arc A750 as well as the A770 GPUs with a particular focus on streaming hardware. This is why you get support for hardware accelerated media like AV1, HEVC, H.264, VP9, etc.
In terms of physical dimensions, the card is about 10.5 inches long and takes up as many full-length slots on your typical chassis. What this means is that the card isn’t as thick as some of NVIDIA’s recent offerings, but at the same time it’s quite a bit taller compared to its closest competitor, the RTX 3060.
Arc also has a bunch of features that make it very attractive. For example, Intel GPUs come with Intel XeSS or Xe Super Sampling technology, which basically works like DLSS, but in a better way. And because it’s only slightly better than DLSS and much better than anything AMD has to offer, developers should embrace the new standard, very soon.
Intel also supports AV1 encoding and decoding at the hardware level, which will be particularly interesting to streamers. AV1 has much better picture quality compared to H.264, at a fraction of the bit rate. What this means is that video game streaming consumes very little computing power, compared to the traditional H.264 standard.
Intel Arc GPUs also use ReBAR, a feature that turns out to be a double-edged sword for the tech giant. Resizable Base Address Registers, or ReBAR, is also known as Resizable BAR. It’s an optimization technology that gives processors more efficient access to the graphics cards’ VRAM. Basically what this means, is that the CPU can load a bunch of stuff onto the GPU, and just kind of offload its graphical computations which will then allow the GPU to generate frames much faster. This effectively reduces the frame generation time for GPUs to drop significantly.
Intel ReBAR functionality is only present on CPUs starting with the ninth generation. And because the Intel Arc 75o relies heavily on ReBAR, this basically means that computers with older CPUs can’t use the new GPUs to their fullest.
Intel Arc A750 GPU review: Our test rig
We paired our test unit an Arc A750 GPU with an Intel Core I7-10700K CPU, 32GB Corsair Vengeance 3200 DDR4 (2X16) RAM, all connected to a B560M DS3H Plus motherboard from Gigabyte. The CPU cooler was the Noctua NH-U12A. Everything was powered by a Corsair CX750M 750W 80 plus bronze PSU and semi-modular.
Intel Arc A750 GPU Review: Performance
Speaking of the RTX 3060, Intel is going right after NVIDIA’s PC GPU without any worries. The Arc A750 simply crushes the best RTX 3060s in games that rely on DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs. This has been the case since the day it was launched. In terms of benchmarks, the Arc A750 again performs very well.
At the time of launch, the Arc A750 struggled a bit with older titles, especially those that were based on the DirectX 11 API and DirectX 9 API – some DirectX 9 API games, however, were completely unplayable thanks to the first native drivers that shipped with the card.
The main reason for this is that Intel hasn’t optimized the card for legacy APIs as much as it has for newer hardware. The ARC A750 was basically running games based on legacy APIs through a conversion emulator or intercompatibility layer that took a hit in the form of performance and framerates.
The Arc A750 did better than the RTX 3060 in most DX12 games up until launch. Now, thanks to the latest driver update, the Arc A750 runs very well in DX11 and older games as well.
However, with the latest set of drivers, the Arc A750 has sorted out most of the holes in the armor.
Because of the latest Arc driver, the Arc A750 saw a jump of about 77 percent in average FPS for CS:GO at 1080p. At 1440p, the jump came to 74 percent. Across the board, the Arc A750 performed about 43 percent better in DX9 games than it did at launch. Even the average 99 FPS across the board is up 60 percent, compared to Launch Driver.
Intel worked really hard to rectify some of the difficult situations it had to deal with when it was first launched. Since October 2022, when Intel launched the Arc GPUs, it has released about 8 drivers, all of which brought some huge performance improvements in older titles.
In newer games, games using a DX12 GPU or Vulkan the Arc 7A50 showed very little to no improvement across most games. This just goes on to show how Intel works on those drivers.
Intel Arc A750 GPU Review: Conclusion
Here we’re answering the big question – should you buy the Intel Arc A750 GPU, or should you buy something from NVIDIA. Given the price difference between Intel’s offerings and even the most basic RTX 3060 GPUs out there, we highly recommend the Arc A750 GPU, if you’re building a brand-new system for 1080p gaming. If you plan on gaming at 1440p, choosing the Arc A750 becomes a no-brainer.
However, if you’re just planning to upgrade your GPU and you’re already running on an older CPU, like an 8th-generation Intel unit or earlier, then we’d just say go for the RTX 3060.
The Intel Arc A750 GPU performs almost as well as the RTX 3060 in most games and, in some cases, outperforms the RTX 3060. Even in most older DX11 or DX9 based games, the Arc A750 GPU has a delta performance of less than 2-5 percent which, realistically speaking, is practically discernible.
The Intel Arc A750 has some advantages over its NVIDIA competitors which once again makes it the de facto choice. If you are a live streamer or content creator of any kind, then again, the Intel Arc A750 seems like the perfect GPU for you, if you are looking to build a budget mod and/or a gaming PC. AV1 video support may not seem that important now, but in retrospect, this is the format all streamers and content creators who know what they’re doing are going to switch to.
