Arc A770 GPUs Are Coming “Very Soon,” Says Intel Leave a comment

In an interview, Intel stated that it would be “very soon” releasing its eagerly anticipated desktop PC Arc Alchemist graphics cards. The company also provided some additional information regarding its future boards.

According to PC Games Hardware, which cited Ryan Shrout, the company’s marketing specialist, and Intel’s Tom Petersen, an Intel Fellow, the Arc A770 Limited Edition add-in-board (AIB) with 16GB of GDDR6 RAM will be the company’s first Arc graphics card for gamers in years. The company’s partners’ customised products using the same graphics processing unit will coexist alongside this one. Since Intel has certified configurations with 8GB of RAM, the customised Arc A770 AIBs will either have 16GB or 8GB of memory. Arc A750 boards with 8GB of GDDR6 will also be offered by graphic card manufacturers.

While positioning the Arc A750 against Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060, Intel views its Arc A770 products as rivals to the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. Intel already provided benchmark results last week demonstrating that its Arc A770 outperformed Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 in ray tracing. It’s possible that this is the corporation reinforcing its performance-related thesis, which must obviously be submitted to independent testing.

In comparison to models with default clocks, some of Intel’s AIB partners’ Arc A700-series boards will ship factory overclocked and with higher power limitations. As a result, these boards will perform better. Will those motherboards rank among the top gaming graphics cards in autumn? Time will only tell.

Notably, Intel strongly advises against utilising their Arc graphics cards with older systems that do not support resizable base address register (BAR), as the performance of Intel’s Arc GPUs may suffer by up to 40%. The good news is that Arc graphics processors will fully support Microsoft’s DirectStorage technology, so once games that use this application programming interface (API) are released, performance of systems incorporating these components (as well as compatible SSDs) should increase.

Although it is clear that Intel’s Arc A770 graphics cards will not be competitive against next-generation models from AMD and Nvidia in high resolutions, Intel hopes that its four XeSS upscaling modes (performance, balanced, quality, and ultra quality) will offer a respectable balance between performance and quality, which will partially make up for lower performance in resolutions like 4K.

Speaking generally about high-resolution output, Intel claims that their future ACM-G10 GPUs do not support native HDMI 2.1 output, necessitating the use of an integrated DisplayPort 2.0 to HDMI 2.1 converter to add the necessary connector to an Arc A700 graphics card. Even though Intel enabled DisplayPort 2.0 with UHBR 20 support in the drivers, it appears that for the time being only UHBR 10 will be supported. According to this information, Intel’s Arc A700 boards won’t offer a “native” 8K output and will instead require two DisplayPort connections to support an 8Kp60 monitor. Because 6Kp60 and 8Kp60 monitors are currently not all that prevalent, the absence of DP 2.0 UHBR 20 functionality is understandable. Intel is keen to discuss the performance and capabilities of its upcoming desktop Arc A700-series discrete graphics cards, but it withholds information about another important aspect of these boards: their cost. We will learn everything very soon, as these products are expected to launch “very soon.”