Intel recently confirmed in an interview that it plans to finally launch the Arc A770 and Arc A750 graphics cards “very soon”. The flagship should be able to compete against Nvidia’s RTX 3060 Ti.
Along with the good news of an imminent launch date, Intel has also shared its big regret, and it’s a major one – Arc Alchemist’s launch strategy.
That’s right – it seems that Intel is finally getting closer to officially launching its flagship gaming graphics cards. Although the company didn’t share an exact release date, it did reveal a lot about the upcoming GPUs. The information comes from two interviews (courtesy of PC Games Hardware and Digital Foundry) with Intel Arc experts; one with Ryan Shrout and Tom Petersen and one with Petersen alone.
Petersen and Shrout teased that the Arc A770 Limited Edition graphics card comes with 16GB of GDDR6 memory. However, custom versions from Intel’s board partners will be available in either 16GB or 8GB variants. The Arc A750 also comes with 8GB of storage.
Some of the GPUs manufactured by Intel’s partners come with a factory overclock that pushes their performance limits. Similar to Nvidia and AMD, this should boost the performance of these GPUs beyond what Intel itself is offering.
Intel expects to beat it with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GPU, at least as far as the flagship A770 is concerned. Instead, the A750 is positioned as a competitor to the RTX 3060. At the beginning of development there were many rumors that the A770 could compete with the RTX 3070, but Intel seems to have abandoned this idea.
The mutable base address register (aka ReBAR) issue was also addressed. Petersen remained open when he recommended that Intel Arc graphics cards be used with newer systems that support ReBAR. Using one of Intel’s GPUs on an older system that doesn’t support this technology can result in a performance drop of up to 40%. This won’t be fixed for Intel Arc, but Intel is hoping to mitigate this in its next-gen offerings.
We’ve already heard from many sources, including Intel themselves, that Arc GPU performance may not blow our minds. Petersen admitted that might not change, saying that the Arc A series “can’t really change dramatically in terms of performance.” Against this background, Intel is still committed to its idea of beating the competition with prices. Unfortunately, we still don’t know how much the GPUs will cost, so it’s hard to say how serious Intel is here.
Intel’s honest approach continues in both interviews, revealing its regrets about a key part of its go-to-market strategy – releasing the Arc A380 only in China initially. Intel admits that this didn’t work out as planned; Media companies weren’t keen on shipping entire systems out of China just to test Intel’s new GPU, so the card received very little coverage. Additionally, Petersen admitted that the massive delays in launching Intel Arc weren’t due to supply shortages – Intel just wasn’t ready to launch the graphics cards yet.
There’s a lot more to learn from the two interviews, so be sure to check them out if you want to know more. Intel’s genuine approach continues to be refreshing, but will the competitive price tag be enough to earn these graphics cards our list of the best GPUs of the year? We’ll have to wait.
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