While Nvidia and AMD have dominated the graphics card industry for quite a long while now,Intelmay be on the cusp of shaking up this niche at long last. Its Arc lineup of graphics cards may have been a long time coming, and it might not be able to go toe-to-toe with super-high-end GPUs such as the RTX 3090Ti and its imminent successor, but mid-tier offerings are already rather promising.
In fact, the latest benchmark sheet fromIntelsuggests that its Nvidia RTX 3060 competitor, the Arc A770, may well be better performaning in a variety of raytracing-enabled video games. Intel’s flagship GPU seems to run some raytraced games substantially better than the RTX 3060 at 1920x1080, though it’s far from a complete wash for Nvidia’s mid-tier offering.
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WhileIntel claims its laptop Arc GPUs outperform Nvidia’smobile RTX chips, information about the mainline desktop cards has sadly been somewhat scarce ahead of its release. Now, however, Intel’s benchmarks suggest that the A770 runs some raytracing games way better than the RTX 3060 does. Specifically, raytracedFortniteseems to run about 56% faster at 1080p on the A770, while benchmarking darlingControlperforms roughly 19% better. In select cases, however, RTX 3060 still fares better, withF1 2022,Guardians of the Galaxy, andBattlefield Vall showing less performance on the Intel GPU.
Overall, Intel’s testing referenced 17 unique games, with just four of them running better on the Nvidia RTX 3060. This, it’s worth pointing out, is without touching upon any AI-based supersampling solutions. The following graph showcasedIntel’s proprietary XeSS AI supersampler, which can substantially boost the card’s performance, all the while rendering the games at a higher 1440p resolution.
While theearly testing of Intel’s mobile Arc GPUsshowed that the first generation of these graphics cards won’t compete with Nvidia and AMD’s top-end products, this isn’t overly surprising. Intel hasn’t previously produced a baseline of fully fledged desktop graphics processors, making this a remarkably tall expectation for a relative newcomer to this niche. By competing in the mid-range category, however, Intel may be able to eke out a few key wins this time around, which may prove crucial for its future GPU releases.
The obvious issue, of course, is thatIntel’s Arc GPUs are coming in late. The global launch of these cards is now slated for the end of 2022, and the pricing is yet to be officially revealed. Considering the fact that A770 is clearly competing with the RTX 3060, however, it’s exceedingly likely that Intel will price them in the ballpark of $400, give or take. Another problem for Intel to consider here, however, is that Nvidia is getting ready to launch its RTX 4000 lineup, with the silver lining being that the RTX 3060 successor isn’t likely to hit the stores until sometime in 2023.
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