All the vital details on Intel’s graphics cards, ready for launch this October
Intel Arc Alchemist prices
Arc Alchemist, or the Arc A-series (as Intel sometimes calls it), is comprised entirely of entry level, low-end and mid-range GPUs. Five core GPUs have been confirmed: the Arc A770, Arc A750, Arc A580, Arc A380, and Arc A310, with the first two also set for fully Intel-built “Limited Edition” models in addition to the various partner card versions.
For now, Intel have only confirmed prices for the standard Arc A750, the Arc A770, and the Arc A770 Limited Edition – and only in USD. The Arc A750 will start at $289, with the Arc A770 at $329 and the A770 Limited Edition at $349.
No word yet on US or UK pricing for other cards in the range yet either, including the Arc A750 Limited Edition. Though judging by the mere $20 gap between the A770 variants, it will likely cost about the same.
Despite the relative lack of pre-release buzz for GPUs besides the A770 and A750, all the confirmed GPUs have had their specs released in full. Here are the headlines:
The Limited Edition variants of the A770 and A750 are akin to Nvidia’s Founders Edition GeForce cards, being built entirely according to Intel’s specifications (including the cooler designs). The A750 Limited Edition appears otherwise identical to the standard version, though the A770 Limited Edition has double the GDDR6 memory of the basic A770. Interestingly, Intel list the “total board power” of both the A770 Limited Edition and A750 Limited Edition as 225W, despite the former having more RAM, ray tracing processors and Xe cores.
That upscaling feature is calledXeSS (Xe Super Sampling), and works similarly toNvidia DLSS,AMD FSR 2.0, andFSR 2.1. To boost performance, games are rendered at lower-than-native resolution. Then, XeSS pieces the on-screen image together, using data from previous frames, to make it resemble native res – so you get most, if not all of the sharpness, with more frames per second.
Anotherrecent Intel blog postgoes into pretty deep technical detail on XeSS; one interesting detail is that it includes its own anti-aliasing, which replaces native edge-smoothers (like TAA) in the upscaling process. DLSS also does this, whereas FSR simply upscales whatever AA the game was already using.
Also like DLSS and FSR, XeSS will require games to actively implement support for it. Here are the confirmed takers so far:
Ray tracing support also comes as standard on Arc Alchemist GPUs, though it remains to be seen how they’ll actually perform with such a demanding graphical luxury enabled. It will also be possible to overclock them, so expect board partner models to launch with modest factory overclocks just as their Nvidia and AMD GPUs most often do.
In a“performance showcase” video, the A750 Limited Edition was shown running Control at 1440p/High between 56fps and 66fps. The specs of the test PC weren’t given, but we can safely assume it included one of Intel’s 12th Gen Core chips (which include several of thebest gaming CPUson the market).
As for the A380, Intel haven’t provided review units outside of China, though some Western outlets (with more money than RPS) have managed to import retail models over to test. The word, unfortunately, is decidedly not good.
Hardware Unboxed’s tests alsorevealed the extentto which the A380 relies onResizeable BAR, regularly suffering double-digit framerate drops from those already-underwhelming results after ReBAR was disabled. Performance could improve in time, maybe even before the worldwide release, if Intel do some good work with future drivers – and that goes for the Arc A750 as well. Still, what we’ve seen so far hasn’t been very compelling.
The one piece of unqualified good news seems to be Arc Alchemist’s AV1 video encoder. AV1 could well be the future of how we watch video online, as it can produce a cleaner image than other current formats (like Nvidia’s H.264) even while using less data to stream. GeForce RTX 30 cards, Radeon RX 6000 cards and (naturally) Intel Arc Alchemist cards all have AV1 decoding capabilities but the Alchemist lineup will feature a proper AV1 encoder as well, making it vastly more accessible to video creators.
Unfortunately – for Intel, anyway – these won’t quite be the first GPUs with AV1 encoding, as it will be a standard feature on GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs, the first of which are releasing on October 12th. Arc A-series cards will be a cheaper option, though. If you’d like to know more about AV1,EposVoxhas a good explainer on it, including some hands-on testing with the Arc A380. Just remember that AV1 encoding will mainly only help you if you’re into video editing or streaming - it won’t help with running games normally.
