What just happened? Intel is likely worried about the amount of negative coverage its Arc Alchemist discreet graphics cards have been receiving, which could explain why the company released a slew of benchmarks showing that the Arc A750 is able to slightly outperform Nvidia's RTX 3060.

Intel revealed the Arc A750 benchmarks for 48 games in a new video on its YouTube channel. Forty-two of these are DirectX 12 titles that include Red Dead Redemption 2 and Assassin's Creed Valhalla, while six are Vulkan games such as Doom Eternal and Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Intel insists that none were cherry-picked.

According to Intel's results, the Arc A750 outpaced the RTX 3060 by 3% on the DirectX 12 games at 1080p with Ultra settings and by 5% at 1440p with high settings. It was a similar story with the Vulkan titles, where the A750 was ahead by 4% (1080p) and 5% (1440p).

Intel used the same Core i9-12900K CPU for all of its benchmarks along with Windows 11. The test PC featured 32GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR5-5200 C38@4,800 MHz with an ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero board and a MP600 Pro XT 4TB NVMe drive for one set of games. For the other set, 32GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR5-5600 C36@5,600 MHz with an ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Apex board and an 870 EVO 500GB/WD 8TB Black HDD was used.

One of the problems seen with early reviews of the Arc cards is that their drivers still need plenty of work, especially when it comes to DirectX 11 games. The A750 in this test used an Intel engineering driver, so the final versions should give performance a bit of a boost.

Intel hasn't yet revealed the specs of the A750, but it's expected to pack 24 Xe cores, 384 Execution Units, 3,072 shaders, 8GB of GDDR6@16Gbps, and a 192-bit memory bus. The card's predicted to cost between $299 and $399 when it arrives later this year.

We recently heard that Intel's Arc Alchemist project seems to be lurching from bad to worse, with reports of dealers, potential distributors, and manufacturers all showing little to no interest in the cards for various reasons.

We recently looked at the entry-level Arc 3 A380, the only card in the series released so far---only in China. The performance isn't exactly exciting, and it's even worse without Resizable bar.

Some people, including the head of Jon Peddie Research, think Intel should abandon Arc Alchemist altogether, letting it join the likes of Optane on the list of projects Chipzilla has killed off. Given that the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group (AXG) recorded a $507 million operating loss during the previous quarter, it's not an entirely unthinkable scenario.