Intel Graphics executives attended the WAN show on Friday as a guest and got the first excellent product to showcase in front of the camera. The Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition graphics card is unboxed, handed over, and rotated at all angles. But that’s not all. Intel PR representatives discussed the technical details of the previously undisclosed graphics card and chatted with the host about game performance.
The design of the A770 featured in the video has much in common with the Intel Arc A750 featured in yesterday’s official performance preview. There is a twin axial fan cooling shroud that looks similar. However, it has more RGB lighting zones / effects, such as a backlit logo on the top of the card and a diffuse RGB light bar along the top / fan side edge, befitting the reference model for our flagship Intel Arc Alchemist GPU. Also slightly recessed behind the twin axial fan is the diffuse RGB light ring. Finally, the RGB lighting swash is also displayed on the back plate.
There was an interesting story about the performance of the Arc A770. I didn’t see any performance figures for the A770, but I heard that Intel’s Tom Peterson (AKA TAP) demonstrated the game with the following titles: Cyberpunk 2077, F1 2021When Shadow of the Tomb Raider.. Linus sounded like he had game time with this setup, but he didn’t get any performance stats. TAP revealed the secret nature of the demo by explaining that the demod card has not yet been sampled with the developer / partner. The demo was a more sneak peek.
Yesterday, if you wanted to extrapolate and guess the performance of the Arc A770, Intel shared the game performance numbers of the Arc A750. The A770 offers 25% more GPU cores, VRAM, and a wider memory bus. Unfortunately, no one talks about other GPU features such as ray tracing and AI accelerators.
Although it was not possible to get performance figures from the Arc A770, TAP made a fairly clear statement about the performance users can expect from the alchemist’s flagship. “This is the first card I’ve seen from Intel and I’m going.” “What do you know? That’s all okay,” said former Intel executive Nvidia.
Performance sounds decent, but of course, the warmth of our welcome depends on the price. On the topic of warmth, TAP argued that the Arc A770 has a dual axial cooler that exceeds specs, so you need to keep your GPU easy, quiet and cool. When playing games on Linus, the GPU temperature peaked at 69 degrees Celsius under load. TAP later added that power consumption was “very tame.” Given the combination of cooling and power consumption, there is the potential for “pretty good” overclocking.
By supporting Adaptive Sync on the software driver side, Intel said the new Arc Alchemist will support a gaming experience enhancement feature called Smooth Sync. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a detailed explanation of Smooth Sync, but it seems to work on any monitor and uses a temporal algorithm to eliminate tearing.
Intel did not share pricing, specific performance claims, or availability dates for the Intel Arc A770. Nonetheless, TAP teased that the availability of this flagship ArcAlchemist GPU came out “before you knew it.”
For more information on Intel Arc, check out the recent ArcA750 Performance Preview and a compilation of all the regularly updated Intel Arc information. Currently, the Intel Arc A770 seems to have a good shot to win the ranking in the best graphics card Roundup after review.
