Intel’s Flagship Arc A770 Graphics Card Gets Previewed In Gaming at 1440p, Early Overclocking Demo Shows Up To 2.5 GHz Clocks
It’s been only a few days since Intel officially lifted the curtains off its flagship Alchemist graphics card, the Arc A770. The card was also teased at the WAN show hosted by Linus Sebastian and Luke Lafreniere with guests from Intel including Tom Petersen and Ryan Shrout. Intel’s graphics division has now given an early look at the performance and overclocking capabilities of its Arc A770 card through Linus’s channel and things look decent however we should also point out that the reviews of the Arc A380 graphics card went live today and not a single reviewer out there is impressed by the driver side of things which makes the lineup pretty much useless for launch at the moment.
The Intel Arc 7 lineup is going to utilize the flagship ACM-G10 GPU and we already know about the mobility variants which include the Arc A770M and the Arc A730M. Similarly, the Arc A770 is one of the top-end variants for desktop PCs that is equipped with the full ACM-G10 configuration, utilizing 32 Xe-Cores for 4096 ALUs, and 32 ray tracing units. In terms of clocks, the GPU should operate at a peak boost of 2.4 GHz which is always going to be higher than its advertised engine clock speed. At 2400 MHz, the GPU should be able to deliver close to 20 TFLOPs of FP32 horsepower. The card also features 16 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit bus interface. The GPU is supplied power through an 8+6 pin connector configuration which maxes out at 300W though the actual TGP/TBP should be lower than that around the 250W range. The demo showed the card running at around 190W. As for performance, we should expect the Arc A770 to land in between the NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti & the RTX 3070 considering the Arc A750 is up to 17% faster than the RTX 3060.
Intel Arc A-Series Desktop Graphics Card Lineup ‘Official’:
In terms of performance, as we discussed before, Intel is primarily focusing on DirectX 12 & Vulkan API titles before moving to more legacy DX11 and older titles. A performance demo of two identical systems running an Intel Core i9-12900KS and the Arc A770 GPU shows that in DX11 the graphics card delivers around 40 FPS while in DX12, the graphics card delivers 80 FPS so that’s a 2x jump in the latest API. This is by no mean an impressive result and shows the driver overhead that Intel’s Arc GPUs have within the older DX11 API. So if you were to get yourself an Arc graphics card, playing games in DX12 will be your safest bet to achieve performance close to its competitors. Intel Arc A770 Graphics Card DX11 vs DX12 Performance In Shadow of The Tomb Raider (Image Credits: LTT): Intel states that there will be three Tiers of optimizations for Arc GPUs. In the 1st Tier, Arc GPUs will deliver the “best-in-class performance. The 2nd Tier is less optimized games but is based on the modern APIs which we just mentioned above so performance here may end up being comparable to or slightly lower than the competition. Lastly, we have the 3rd Tier which is unoptimized titles and running on older APIs. So performance in these games is going to be far worse than the competition. Intel Arc A770 Graphics Card DX11 vs DX12 Overclocking Preview: (Image Credits: LTT): The majority of the performance was tested within Cyberpunk 2077 and F1 2021 which delivered an OK-ish experience at 1440p however overclocking did result in a smoother experience but we didn’t get to see any FPS figures. The graphics card was tuned to a GPU Performance Boost profile of +20% which adjusts the voltage curve, the power limit was raised to 285W while the temperature limit was increased to 125C. The Intel Arc A770 graphics card delivered 100% utilization at a peak clock rate of 2.5 GHz and a maximum temperature of 76C while gaming in Cyberpunk 2077. When the Performance Boost profile was pushed to +30%, the game crashed so that must be the limit of the silicon used in the tests here. Linus speculates that based on the performance and current market situation, the Intel Arc A770 graphics card should end up under the $400 US price which is also where we are expecting the card to land since we already discussed the pricing and performance tiering of the entire Arc discrete desktop graphics card lineup just a few days ago in our exclusive here. The Arc A770 and the rest of the lineup are planned for launch later this summer so stay tuned for more information and demos.
