Intel
it has been about four months Since the launch of Intel The long awaited Arc graphics cards. If you rolled the dice and bought the flagship A770 or A750 for the sake of getting a good deal on a mid-range GPU after two years of artificially inflated prices, that was the news. Especially Hassan. it was there Some strange issues here and therebut Intel kept calling buggy drivers, slowly improving the Arc’s performance across a range of games.
The company is making a pair of announcements today. First, the Arc A750 (the third-fastest Arc card, behind the 16GB and 8GB versions of the A770) gets an official price cut, from $289 to $249. Secondly, the company is releasing another driver update (build 31.0.101.4086), boasting widespread performance improvements in older DirectX 9 games and more targeted optimizations for newer titles related to launch drivers from October.
Intel
In our review, the Arc A750 was usually about 10 or 20 percent slower than the 16GB version of the A770, at least for games where the A750’s 8GB of memory wasn’t a bottleneck. But in games it did well, it usually outperformed Nvidia’s RTX 3060, and Intel driver updates have made the “games the Arc plays well” list a little longer now. The new RTX 3060 is still available somewhere in the $350 to $400 range.
Driver improvements are mostly old news if you’re an Arc owner who installs new updates as they’re released; Several DirectX 9 improvements in particular were previewed In beta driver update in December. Intel appears to be using both DirectX 12- and Vulkan-to-DirectX 9 translation layers, and choose different layers to improve speeds for specific games.
Intel
On average, Intel says these older games will perform 43 percent faster than they would with the launch drivers. The overall gameplay should feel smoother and have fewer hitches, thanks to lower and more consistent frame times.
The improvements for the newer DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games have been smaller and less widespread, according to Intel. It’s hard to just say How do They’re much faster, on average, because Intel’s charts sometimes skew into hard-to-analyze metrics like “average FPS per dollar.” But the company’s focus is on large multiplayer games (FortniteAnd appraisalAnd Dota 2And league of legends) and major versions (Doctrine killerAnd Red Dead Redemption 2And Cyberpunk 2077 movie) means that most people have probably played at least a few games that have benefited from the Intel driver’s work so far.
Intel
In the months leading up to Arc’s release, Intel went on a preemptive apology tour, explaining several times that Arc’s performance in newer DirectX 12 and Vulkan games would be great, but that performance in DirectX 11 and older games would be hit-or-miss.
It wasn’t the best place to start for Intel, especially since the Arc was also a late arrival to the party — it was designed to compete with the Nvidia RTX 3000 series and AMD RX 6000 series, both of which they had already replaced. Intel also missed the opportunity to launch while the GPU shortage in 2021 and 2022 was in full swing. But the explanations were really helpful in setting expectations, and most GPU reviews were at least faintly positive where they could have been unforgivingly negative.
It’s hard to say if this effort translates into sales, though most signs point to a slow start. Arc has yet to scan its Steam Hardware Survey data As of December 2022, and is still lumped together with the “other”. If we use customer ratings as a proxy for popularity, all of it Arc A770 and A750 GPUscombined, a total of 142 reviews on Newegg, instead Lists RTX 3060 GPU collectively several times that amount.