Intel’s first enthusiast-grade graphics cards are here – and on the eve of AMD and Nvidia’s transition to a new generation, Team Blue has actually done well. The $289 Arc A750 and $329/$349 Arc A770 offer surprisingly strong 1080p performance, a unique mix of features and aggressive pricing that makes them well worth considering for a mid-range PC – for most gamers, anyway.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though. There’s loads to cover here and time is short, so let’s take a quick overview of the hardware, cover the software features we’re most interested in and then get into the meat of this review: gaming benchmarks.
We’ve got a brand new GPU test suite for late 2022, with a tranche of complete newcomers joining a remixed assortment of Digital Foundry favourites covering every major engine. It’s a forward-looking test suite, with titles using modern APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan, which should give Intel a chance to demonstrate its strengths. Of course, we’ll also be taking a look at performance in some classic ‘banana skin’ DX11 titles in our video review, where we expect Intel’s first-generation Arc GPUs to have slightly more difficulty.
