In a nutshell: Are you excited about Intel's Arc A770 and A750 cards? Probably not, especially in light of the RTX 4000 and Radeon RX 7000 series on their way. Still, Intel's midrange products are launching simultaneously and "very soon," according to employees.
With the underwhelming, entry-level Arc 3 A380 the only one of Intel's new dedicated graphics cards available, we've been waiting to see what the more powerful Arc A7 series can offer. There have been concerns that Intel was once again about to miss a deadline with these products: it said they would arrive in summer, a season that's just a couple of weeks away from ending.
But in an interview with PC Games Hardware and Digital Foundry, Intel's Tom Petersen and Ryan Shrout confirmed that the A770 and A750 are set to launch "very soon."
Intel has been hyping the Arc 7 A770 as a card that can outperform the RTX 3060 in 1080p ray tracing benchmarks, suggesting its performance will be closer to the RTX 3060 Ti, leaving the A750 as a rival for the non-Ti RTX 3060.
The employees confirmed that custom A770 cards would come in both 8GB and 16GB flavors, though the Limited Edition, which is Intel's reference design, will only be available with 16GB of VRAM. The A750, meanwhile, will only feature 8GB of VRAM. Some of the cards' AIB partner models will be factory overclocked, offering better performance compared to the reference design.
Our own Steve Walton noted that the Arc 3 A380 requires resizable base address register (ReBAR) enabled; otherwise, you can expect a massive fps drop. Intel says this won't change with the upcoming A7 cards, so those with older systems should probably stay clear, but it's working to address the issue in future Arc generations. Intel also said that its ACM-G10 GPU, used in the upcoming cards, doesn't natively support HDMI 2.1 output
Some of the A770/750's more appealing features include full support for Microsoft's DirectStorage technology, though we'll have to wait until Forspoken arrives next year to see how much it benefits PC games. There's also Intel's XeSS upscaling tech that the company says can more than double fps (using performance mode) in some 1440p games.
Intel still hasn't revealed how much these cards will cost when they launch in "key countries"—as opposed to just China. The company has long stressed that they will offer excellent value for gamers, but with Ampere's price constantly falling as Lovelace approaches, it'll be interesting to see just how much of an impact on the market they have, and if Intel keeps its promise not to abandon Arc.
https://www.techspot.com/news/95874-intel-arc-alchemist-a770-a750-cards-launch-soon.html
