Intel's Arc A770 16GB graphics card reaches $300 in the US, as DX11 performance rises by 19 percent
A good day for Intel.
Intel's A750 and A770 graphics cards tend to be great value, but have a few gaping holes when it comes to performance in older graphics APIs like DirectX 9 and DirectX 11. That's slowly changing though - in fact, the company announced significant frame-rate improvements in DX11 titles today - while price drops continue to bring these GPUs into an even more favourable price/performance window. One case is the Arc A770 16GB, which is now available from Newegg for just $300, down from their regular US MSRP of $330.
The Arc A770 is the company's top-end offering at the moment, and offered similar performance at launch to Nvidia's RTX 3060 and AMD's RX 6600 XT according to my testing over at Digital Foundry. Performance has continued to improve since we ran our tests last year, and with the latest DX9 and DX11 updates the whole package is looking much stronger.
With the cheapest RTX 3060 unit at $250 and the cheapest RX 6600 XT at $257, there's a fair argument to say that the A770 is the best value card of the three available - before you even consider its 16GB of VRAM, a rarity at this price point.
However, it's also worth considering the Arc A770 8GB and the Arc A750 8GB, which are available at $250 and $200 respectively. These cards offer the vast majority of the capabilities of the A770 16GB card (with identical performance if VRAM isn't exhausted with the A770 8GB, and within three to 10 percent for the A750) for considerably less money, and should also be considered alongside the flagship Arc model featured in today's deal.
While DX11 performance has improved, note that you'll still need Resizeable BAR supported by your motherboard to get convincing performance, as a nicety for Nvidia and AMD cards remains an absolute necessity for Intel. This isn't an issue for most recent motherboards - those produced within the last three or so years - but might trip up older builds that don't have newer motherboard BIOSes available. Do check by Googling the name of your motherboard and the word "resizeable bar" to find out!
I hope this deal was helpful. What are you impressions of Intel graphics cards so far? Let me know in the comments below!