Introduction

Intel’s Arc 7-series is finally here, with the promise of high performance gaming at competitive prices. The new Arc A750 “Alchemist” launches at just $289, and we have the review for you. Intel’s new card promises AAA gaming at 1080p and 1440p resolutions, or high refresh-rate e-sports gaming. The company’s entry to the gaming discrete graphics space is mainly a byproduct of the company’s investments in the highly scalable Xe HPC/AI compute processors, to grab a slice of this high-margin pie. While NVIDIA and AMD scaled up their traditional GPUs and stripped them of graphics-rendering hardware to create their compute processors; Intel’s development is in the opposite direction—to scale down its compute processors and add graphics-relevant hardware. Since Intel has a reputation for being perfectionists with silicon engineering, and that they’re known not to enter a market unless they can make the best processors; the new Xe-HPG graphics architecture enters the market in the performance-segment. The Arc 7-series will compete with the best selling SKUs of both NVIDIA and AMD—the GeForce RTX 3060 and Radeon RX 6600 XT. If Intel can crack this market, we might get a third player in the GPU market, which will lead to more competition at better prices.

The Arc A750 is based on the same 6 nm ACM-G10 silicon as the $349 A770 Limited Edition which we’re also reviewing today, but is slightly cut down. While the A770 maxes the silicon out with all 32 Xe Cores across 8 Render Slices, the A750 is carved out by disabling one of those Render Slices, leaving us with 7, or 28 Xe Cores. The memory size is set at 8 GB, across the same 256-bit GDDR6 memory bus width; but at a slower data-rate of 16 Gbps (512 GB/s total bandwidth), compared to 17.5 Gbps (560 GB/s bandwidth) of the A770. There’s no 16 GB variant, unlike with the A770.

The Arc A750 targets the same class of gamers as the A770—1080p or 1440p AAA gaming at high to extreme settings; with real-time ray tracing added to the mix. You can enable XeSS and yield higher performance at minimal quality loss, much like you can with DLSS on NVIDIA, and FSR on AMD. Much like FSR, XeSS works on all brands of GPUs, however, on Arc GPUs, XeSS takes advantage of the Intel XMX matrix-acceleration, offering a much higher performance uplift. Intel also claims technological parity with NVIDIA for its ray tracing architecture, where Arc GPUS rely as extensively on fixed-function hardware as NVIDIA GPUs do. The shader reordering technology used by Intel is on-par with what NVIDIA is only now beginning to roll out with its RTX 40-series “Ada” architecture.

Intel Arc graphics family has full support for the DirectX 12 Ultimate software feature-set, including real time ray tracing, variable rate shading, mesh shaders, and sampler feedback. It also supports other APIs, such as Vulkan and OpenGL. Some older versions of Direct3D, such as D3D9, are emulated on D3D12. In this review, we take the Arc A750 for a test-drive along our vast selection of games, to show you if it’s better value for money than the A770.