Enlarge / Arc is Intel's attempt to shake up the GPU market. (credit: Intel)

Intel's Arc A750 and A770 GPUs were finally released earlier this month after years of teases, announcements, and delays , and the end result is a pair of GPUs that generally offer respectable performance for the price. But Intel's first true gaming-focused dedicated GPU architecture has also had lots of first-generation jitters, including glitchy drivers and performance issues in games that don't use modern DirectX 12 or Vulkan graphics APIs.

Another early issue may be idle power consumption—the amount of power these GPUs consume when they aren't being actively used or when they're only rendering your desktop. Intel published a troubleshooting article late last week that acknowledged that Arc desktop GPUs could suffer from "high idle power consumption," along with steps for remediating the issue.

Users will need to go into their PC's BIOS and configure a pair of advanced PCI Express power management settings—the "Native ASPM" (or Active State Power Management) setting should be enabled, and the "PCI Express root port ASPM" setting should be enabled and set to "L1 Substates." You'll also need to set the PCI Express Link State Power Management setting to "maximum power savings" in Windows' advanced power options settings.

Enlarge / We took our handsome pair of new Arc A700-series GPUs out for some glamour shots. While minding standard static-related protocols, of course. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

What's it like owning a brand-new Intel Arc A700-series graphics card? Is it the show-stopping clapback against Nvidia that wallet-pinched PC gamers have been dreaming of? Is it an absolute mess of unoptimized hardware and software? Does it play video games?

That last question is easy to answer: yes, and pretty well. Intel now has a series of GPUs entering the PC gaming market just in time for a few major industry trends to play out: some easing in the supply chain, some crashes in cryptocurrency markets, and more GPUs being sold near their originally announced MSRPs . If those factors continue to move in consumer-friendly directions, it will mean that people might actually get to buy and enjoy the best parts of Intel’s new A700-series graphics cards. (Sadly, limited stock remains a concern in modern GPU reviews. Without firm answers from Intel on how many units it's making, we’re left wondering what kind of Arc GPU sell-outs to expect until further notice.)

While this is a fantastic first-generation stab at an established market, it’s still a first-generation stab. In great news, Intel is taking the GPU market seriously with how its Arc A770 (starting at $329) and Arc A750 (starting at $289) cards are architected. The best results are trained on modern and future rendering APIs, and in those gaming scenarios, their power and performance exceed their price points.

Enlarge / Intel arrives at a crucial sub-$300 price for its medium-end GPU option. But will that bear out as a worthwhile price compared to its performance? (credit: Intel)

Intel's highest-end graphics card lineup is approaching its retail launch, and that means we're getting more answers to crucial market questions of prices, launch dates, performance, and availability. Today, Intel answered more of those A700-series GPU questions, and they're paired with claims that every card in the Arc A700 series punches back at Nvidia's 18-month-old RTX 3060.

After announcing a $329 price for its A770 GPU earlier this week, Intel clarified that the company would launch three A700 series products on October 12: The aforementioned Arc A770 for $329, which sports 8GB of GDDR6 memory; an additional Arc A770 Limited Edition for $349, which jumps up to 16GB of GDDR6 at slightly higher memory bandwidth and otherwise sports otherwise identical specs; and the slightly weaker A750 Limited Edition for $289.

A770 (16GB model) and A750 specs breakdown. (credit: Intel)

If you missed the memo on that sub-$300 GPU when it was previously announced, the A750 LE is essentially a binned version of the A770's chipset with 87.5 percent of the shading units and ray tracing (RT) units turned on, along with an ever-so-slightly downclocked boost clock (2.05 GHz, compared to 2.1 GHz on both A770 models).

Enlarge / The Arc A770 GPU, coming from Intel on October 12, starting at $329. (credit: Intel)

One week after Nvidia moved forward with some of its highest graphics card prices , Intel emerged with splashy news: a price for its 2023 graphics cards that lands a bit closer to Earth.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger took the keynote stage on Tuesday at the latest Intel Innovation event to confirm a starting price and release date for the upcoming Arc A770 GPU: $329 on October 12.

That price comes well below last week's highest-end Nvidia GPU prices but is meant to more closely correlate with existing GPUs from AMD and Nvidia in the $300 range. Crucially, Intel claims that its A770, the highest-end product from the company's first wave of graphics cards, will compare to or even exceed the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti , which debuted last year at $399 and continues to stick to that price point at most marketplaces.

Enlarge / Intel's GPU performance tiers. The gap between 3 and 5 is much larger than the gap between 5 and 7. (credit: Intel)

Intel’s slow, steady drip of information about its upcoming Arc GPUs continued last week when the company released the final specs for its four A-series desktop graphics cards. As with the laptop GPUs the company announced earlier this year, the desktop Arc cards are split between the entry-level Arc 3, midrange Arc 5, and high-end Arc 7 tiers.

The only Arc GPU that has been extensively vetted by independent testers is the entry-level A380, which is also the only one that has had any kind of official launch in the US (this back-ordered $140 ASRock Challenger model listed on Newegg, not counting more expensive cards imported from China). It's by far the weakest GPU in the lineup, with just eight of Intel's Xe cores and ray tracing units and 6GB of GDDR6 memory on a 96-bit memory bus. Reviews usually show the A380 trading blows with older and budget-focused GPUs like Nvidia's GTX 1650 or AMD's RX 6400, depending on the game.

The Arc 5 and Arc 7 cards are all based on the same die, with more GPU cores shut off for the lower-end versions. (credit: Intel)

The other three GPUs are all a lot more similar. The A580, A750, and A770 have 24, 28, and 32 Xe cores, respectively, all increasing in clock speed as you climb upwards. But they all share a 256-bit memory bus and 8GB of GDDR6 RAM (with a 16GB option available for the A770). Intel showed off its own "Limited Edition" first-party versions of the A770 and A750; they share the same basic board and fan design and 225 W board power, but the A770 has built-in LEDs, and the A750 doesn't. Intel is presumably leaving the lower-end A580 and A380 cards to its board partners, rather than making its own versions.

Enlarge / Team Fortress 2 is one of several still-popular games that use the DirectX9 API instead of a more modern version. (credit: Valve)

Intel's graphics marketing team is currently in the middle of an expectations-setting PR blitz around its upcoming Arc GPUs . Partly because of immature drivers, the new graphics cards generally perform much better in newer games using the DirectX12 and Vulkan APIs than they do in older DirectX and OpenGL games. The problem for Intel is that not all games use the latest APIs, especially competitive multiplayer titles that have been around for a while.

For older games using the DirectX9 API, the company has come up with a unique solution. Tom's Hardware reports that Intel's latest GPUs will no longer support DirectX9 natively, instead relying on a Microsoft-provided software translation layer called D3D9On12 to convert Direct3D9 API calls into Direct3D12 ones (Direct3D is the name for the 3D graphics-related parts of DirectX).

Intel's support page , dated August 10, says that D3D9On12 will be used on all Arc GPUs and the integrated GPUs in 12th-generation Core processors. Despite being nearly identical to their 12th-gen counterparts, the integrated GPUs in 11th-generation CPUs will continue to support DirectX9 natively unless they're in a PC with an Arc GPU present.

Enlarge / Intel's as-yet-unreleased Arc A750 Limited Edition card. The "Limited Edition" GPUs appear to be reference models along the lines of Nvidia's Founder's Edition cards and AMD's first-party graphics cards. (credit: Intel)

Intel still hasn't announced a release date for its Arc dedicated graphics cards, but the company has conducted a PR offensive over the last few weeks to set expectations and preview how the cards are stacking up. In a video and accompanying post today , company representatives Ryan Shrout and Tom Peterson compared the upcoming Arc A750 card to Nvidia's RTX 3060 in a few dozen DirectX12 and Vulkan games They demonstrated that the card is usually able to keep up with the most popular member of the RTX 3000 GPU family.

In a series of tests at 1080p and 1440p, Intel's tests show that the A750 usually comes within a few percent of the RTX 3060's performance, sometimes overperforming ( Cyberpunk 2077, Fortnite , Microsoft Flight Simulator ), sometimes underperforming ( Assassin's Creed Valhalla , Deathloop ), and sometimes roughly matching Nvidia's average frame rates ( DOTA 2 , Hitman 3 , Death Stranding ). Average FPS is just one way to measure game performance—crucially, Intel didn't provide any minimum or 1 percent low frame rates, which can have more of an impact on how smooth your game feels when you're playing it. But if you take these tests at face value, the Arc A750 does at least appear to be a viable midrange GPU competitor.

• 

  Intel ran tests in a series of DirectX12 games and compared their average FPS performance to the Nvidia RTX 3060. [credit: Intel ]

Of course, there is one important metric in which Intel's Arc GPU can't compete with Nvidia's: The RTX 3060 is a graphics card you can go out and buy and install in your PC today, and the Arc A750 isn't. Rumors out of this year's SIGGRAPH conference, where Intel has been giving technical demos of its GPUs and announcing a few workstation-oriented Arc Pro products , suggest that we could still see an Arc hardware launch by the end of the summer . But officially, the company still has no news to share about a concrete launch window.

Enlarge / Arc is Intel's attempt to shake up the GPU market.

Almost a year ago, Intel made a big announcement about its push into the dedicated graphics business. Intel Arc would be the brand name for a new batch of gaming GPUs, pushing far beyond the company's previous efforts and competing directly with Nvidia's GeForce and AMD's Radeon GPUs.

Arc is the culmination of years of work, going back to at least 2017, when Intel poached AMD GPU architect Raja Koduri to run its own graphics division . And while Intel would be trying to break into an established and fiercely competitive market, it would benefit from the experience and gigantic install base that the company had cultivated with its integrated GPUs.

Intel sought to prove its commitment to Arc by showing off a years-long road map , with four separate named GPU architectures already in the pipeline. Sure, the GPUs wouldn't compete with top-tier GeForce and Radeon cards, but they would address the crucial mainstream GPU market , and high-end cards would follow once the brand was more established.