The Intel Arc Alchemist architecture brings a third competitor to the best graphics cards. It doesn’t beat GPU benchmarks in terms of performance, but it certainly has a strong value proposition. At the same time, the driver still has areas that need tweaking — Mine Craft Ray tracing is one example that immediately comes to mind, as it’s one of the games in the standard test suite. However, Intel hopes to spur further adoption with its latest announcement of its $40 price cut on the Intel Arc A750, bringing it down to just $250.
It’s hard to say exactly how many people have bought either mobile or desktop since Intel Arc graphics cards first became available in spring 2023. We’ve seen claims that Intel’s dedicated GPUs accounted for up to 4% of total revenue in Q4. It’s 2022, but so far, Arc GPUs are Steam Hardware Survey (opens in new tab) (Will be updated with January data soon, so subject to change). Sure, he could drop the price of the A750 by 14%.
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It’s not just about lowering the price. Since releasing his 3490 driver in October 2022, Intel has contributed three of his WHQL drivers and at least four beta drivers. The latest beta, version 4090, was made available last week, and performance and compatibility improvements are the primary goals of all driver updates.
DirectX 9 performance is an area Intel didn’t pay much attention to before Arc’s launch and is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the new driver. Intel claims a 43% increase in average framerate at 1080p and a 60% increase in 99th percentile fps across its test suite of 13 games. At 1440p, average fps improved by 35% and 99th percentile fps improved by 52%.
Admittedly, the DX9 game test suite isn’t meant to make a game that didn’t work suddenly work. worst performance of the suite, Stellaris, it looks like it ran at about 75 fps with the boot driver, but now it’s at like 130 fps.and half life 2 It went from just under 400 fps to about 600 fps. Still, the overall experience is better, with much more consistent framerates and frame times.
Intel also continues to push the XeSS (Xe Super Sampling) AI upscaling algorithm as an alternative to Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR technology. The adoption rate isn’t that high, but considering Intel’s entry into the dedicated GPU space, 35 games supporting his XeSS in the first six months or so is pretty reasonable.
Another feature of the Arc GPU is support for video encoding and decoding. Arc is the first modern GPU to offer full AV1 support, and the quality of Quick Sync Video encoding rivals Nvidia’s highest quality (AMD lags behind previous generation GPUs, but You should consider the latest RDNA 3 chips). .
But it’s not just the sun and flowers.our own test bright memory infinite (using bright memory infinite Steam benchmark) and Mine Craft It shows that there is still room for improvement. Another interesting aspect of the Arc GPUs we discovered is that with the Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 32″ monitor, the DisplayPort connection can only run up to 4K and 120 Hz, whereas Nvidia’s RTX 20 series and later (DP1 .4a) all support 4K and 240 Hz via display stream compression.
Ultimately, dropping the price of the A750 by $40 probably wouldn’t change the minds of millions of gamers, but it would make the whole package more appealing.Added Intel nightingale and Settlers: New Allies A software bundle for those who have purchased a new Arc graphics card or system with an Arc GPU. As we said before, Intel may not have the fastest card on the planet, but the value proposition is certainly worth considering.
For reference, here’s Intel’s complete slide deck.
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