Enlarge / Intel's Alchemist GPU silicon, the heart of the Arc A750, A770, and now, the A580. (credit: Intel)

Intel's Arc GPUs aren't bad for what they are, but a relatively late launch and driver problems meant that the company had to curtail its ambitions quite a bit. Early leaks and rumors that suggested a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti or RTX 3070 level of performance for the top-end Arc card never panned out, and the best Arc cards can usually only compete with $300-and-under midrange GPUs from AMD and Nvidia.

Today Intel is quietly releasing another GPU into that same midrange milieu, the Arc A580 . Priced starting at $179, the card aims to compete with lower-end last-gen GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 or AMD Radeon RX 6600, cards currently available for around $200 that aim to provide a solid 1080p gaming experience (though sometimes with a setting or two turned down for newer and more demanding games).

The A580 is based on the exact same Alchemist silicon as the Arc A750 and A770 , but with just 24 of the Xe graphics cores enabled, instead of 28 for the A750 and 32 for the A770. That does mean it has the exact same 256-bit memory bus as those higher-end cards, attached to a serviceable-for-the-price 8GB pool of GDDR6 RAM. Reviews from outlets like Tom's Hardware generally show the A580 beating the RTX 3050 and RX 6600 in most games, but falling a little short of the RTX 3060 and RX 7600 (to say nothing of the RTX 4060 , which beats the Arc A750 and A770 in most games).

Enlarge / The RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Last week, AMD announced what are probably the last major GPU launches of this generation of graphics cards: the $449 Radeon RX 7700 XT and $499 Radeon RX 7800 XT . AMD's pricing and performance numbers pit the cards against Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (specifically the $499 16GB version) and the $599 RTX 4070 .

AMD's pricing is aggressive enough that Nvidia is quietly cutting the prices of some 16GB RTX 4060 Ti cards to $449, to match the RX 7700 XT. The announcement about the $50 reduction was buried toward the bottom of an email that Nvidia sent to GPU reviewers ahead of AMD's launch next week; it also drew attention to Nvidia-specific features like DLSS upscaling and frame generation, which compete with AMD's GPU-agnostic FSR , plus recent DLSS improvements that improve ray-tracing performance.

"Finally, as a reminder, market prices can vary from the original launch MSRPs," Nvidia's Brian Burke wrote. "Today, GeForce RTX 4070 is widely available at $599, and GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB is now available at $449. Both of these GPUs are great upgrade choices for gamers seeking their next GPU for the upcoming 2 to 3 years."

Enlarge / AMD's FSR 3 will compete with Nvidia's proprietary DLSS Frame Generation feature starting in September. (credit: AMD)

Even if you're not interested in buying one of the new Radeon graphics cards AMD announced today , the company still has some software-related announcements of interest to anyone who plays games on their PC. And that includes not just owners of older AMD GPUs but people who use Nvidia GeForce or Intel Arc cards, too.

First, AMD is finally ready to reveal more details about FidelityFX Super Resolution version 3, the latest major update to the company's open source upsampling technology. A competitor to Nvidia's proprietary Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and Intel's GPU-agnostic but nascent XeSS, all of these technologies attempt to generate a high-resolution image by rendering a lower-resolution image, blowing it up and filling in the gaps algorithmically to approximate what a natively rendered image would have looked like.

What GPUs support FSR 3?

Last year, FSR 2.0 went a long way toward making the technology more competitive with DLSS while also working on a wider range of graphics hardware from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. Contrary to some prior speculation, FSR 3 will continue to support a wide range of old and new GPUs from all three major GPU companies. AMD has confirmed to us that the following graphics hardware should all support FSR 3:

Enlarge / Asus' Chromebook Flip CX5 was one of the streaming-oriented gaming Chromebooks announced late last year. (credit: Asus)

Google and some of its Chromebook partners decided to try making " gaming Chromebooks " a thing late last year. These machines included some gaming laptop features like configurable RGB keyboards and high refresh rate screens, but because they still used integrated GPUs, they were meant mostly for use with streaming services like Nvidia's GeForce Now and Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming .

But there were also apparently plans for some gaming Chromebooks with the power to play more games locally. Earlier this year, 9to5Google spotted developer comments earlier this year pointing to a Chromebook board (codenamed Hades) that would have included a dedicated GeForce RTX 4050 GPU like the one found in some Windows gaming notebooks. This board would have served as a foundation that multiple PC makers could have used to build Chromebooks.

But these models apparently won't be seeing the light of day anytime soon. Developer comments spotted by About Chromebooks this week indicate that the Hades board (plus a couple of other Nvidia-equipped boards, Agah and Herobrine) has been canceled, which means that any laptops based on that board won't be happening.

Enlarge / Intel is playing up the cumulative performance improvements for DirectX 11 games since its Arc GPUs launched almost a year ago. (credit: Intel)

When they launched last fall , Intel's drivers for its Arc dedicated graphics cards were in rough shape. The company's messaging at the time—and for months beforehand—was something along the lines of, "We're aware, and we're working on it."

I tend to be skeptical of these kinds of " we'll fix it in post " promises; you should buy products based on what they do now and not what the manufacturer promises they will one day be able to do, especially for something like consumer graphics cards where there are plenty of alternatives. But credit where it's due, Intel has put quite a bit of work into improving its drivers in the year or so since the first Arc cards launched.

Today the company has rounded up a collection of improvements made to its DirectX 11 drivers since launch, with a collection of games that run about 19 percent faster on average than they did last October. Though Arc's performance in modern DirectX 12 and Vulkan games has always been good for the price, older APIs like DirectX 9 and 11 were particular weak points of Arc's when compared to competing cards like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and 3060 series and the AMD Radeon RX 7600 and 6600 series.

Enlarge / PNY's take on the basic $299 version of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Nvidia's GeForce 1060, 2060, and 3060 graphics cards are some of the most widely used GPUs in all of PC gaming. Four of Steam's top five GPUs are 60-series cards, and the only one that isn't is an even lower-end GTX 1650.

All of this is to say that, despite all the fanfare for high-end products like the RTX 4090, the new GeForce RTX 4060 is Nvidia's most important Ada Lovelace-based GPU. History suggests that it will become a baseline for game developers to aim for and the go-to recommendation for most entry-level-to-mainstream PC gaming builds.

The RTX 4060, which launches this week starting at $299, is mostly up to the task. It's faster and considerably more power efficient than the 3060 it replaces, and it doesn't come with the same generation-over-generation price hike as the higher-end Lovelace GPUs. It's also a solid value compared to the 4060 Ti, typically delivering between 80 and 90 percent of the 4060 Ti's performance for 75 percent of the money.

Enlarge / Nvidia's RTX 4080 and 4070 could finally be getting some more reasonably priced relatives. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

There are two kinds of GPUs you can buy right now if you want to build or upgrade a gaming PC: affordable but old ones and new but expensive ones. Both Nvidia and AMD have been leaning on older products, sometimes with price cuts, to fill the very large gaps in the middle and low ends of their current lineups. But a slowly building buzz of rumors and leaks suggests things should change before long.

A source speaking to VideoCardz dot com says there are three GeForce RTX 4060-series GPUs coming in the next couple of months, starting with an 8GB version of the 4060 Ti that could be announced as soon as next week and released by the end of the month. A 16GB version of the 4060 Ti and an 8GB version of the 4060 could be announced at the same time but launch at some point in July (Nvidia used the same simultaneous-announcement, staggered-release strategy for the 4090 and 4080 series).

It's not surprising that the 4060 Ti looks like a big step down from the recently released RTX 4070 —4,352 CUDA cores instead of 5,888, a 128-bit memory bus instead of 192-bit, 8GB instead of 12GB. But it also looks less-than-promising as a step up from 2020's RTX 3060 Ti, which used a 256-bit memory bus, 4,864 CUDA cores, and the same amount of RAM. Extra cache memory, higher clock speeds, and the updated Ada Lovelace architecture should all make the 4060 Ti faster than the 3060 Ti in the end, but it may not be a huge generational leap.

Enlarge / Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 is here . It's the company's first launch in over a year of a graphics card that could charitably be described as "mainstream," both in performance and in price. It costs $600.

It's not productive to keep going back to the also-$600 GTX 1080 , at the time the fastest graphics card you could buy anywhere from anyone, and wondering how we got here from there ( some of it is inflation, not all of it). But I keep doing it as a reminder that $600 is still more than many people pay for their entire PC, tablet, smartphone, or high-end game console. No other component in a gaming PC has seen its price shoot up like this over the same span of time; a Core i5 CPU cost around $200 in 2016 and costs around $200 now , and RAM and SSDs are both historically cheap at the moment.

To review the 4070 is to simultaneously be impressed by it as a product while also being frustrated with the conditions that led us to an "impressive" $600 midrange graphics card. It's pretty fast, very efficient, and much more reasonably sized than other recent Nvidia GPUs. In today's topsy-turvy graphics card market, I could even describe it as a good deal. But if you're still yearning for the days when you could spend $300 or less on a reasonably performant GPU with the latest architecture and modern features, keep waiting.