Introduction

Intel Arc “Alchemist” A770 is the company’s first major attempt at high-performance gaming, which is what the Xe-HPG graphics architecture is all about, we’ll take a closer look in this review. Up until “Alchemist,” Intel was mainly focused on giving its client processors a decent integrated graphics solution with Xe, that could handle the rich user interfaces of modern operating systems, as well as web-browsing with increasing amounts of raster graphics and video acceleration. Intel’s entry to the high performance discrete graphics segment is fueled mainly by the growth in PC gaming, and rising margins in discrete GPUs by established players NVIDIA and AMD, which has the potential to spike each time crypto-currency mining experiences a cycle. Intel’s biggest strides toward discrete GPUs were taken in the thick of the GPU supply crisis, as gamers were ready to give up on the PC platform, due to unreasonably high prices from crypto-mining and scalping. If Intel can establish itself as one of the good guys to gamers, demonstrating that it can deliver a good product, with good supply, then it will unsettle the NVIDIA-AMD duopoly, and establish Intel as a key player in this segment.

Intel Xe-HPG is also a co-product of Intel’s renewed push in the accelerated computing space, where it’s seeing rivals NVIDIA and AMD release HPC processors to compete in the high-margin AI processing space. Intel developed the Xe-HP architecture and the “Ponte Vecchio” HPC processor. This also meant that the company had a formidable, highly scalable SIMD architecture that it could build discrete GPUs with, if it can just innovate the necessary raster graphics and ray tracing hardware, and build a software stack around it. Intel knows that it cannot compete in the high-end discrete GPU space without being contemporary with its feature-set, and so the entire product-stack in the Arc “Alchemist” family meets DirectX 12 Ultimate spec, including real-time ray tracing, mesh shaders, variable-rate shading, and sampler feedback. Intel also knows that native-resolution rendering is sliding out of the realm of possibility for mainstream GPU price-points, and given that the other companies developed features such as DLSS and FSR, it needed one such of its own—XeSS. Intel “Alchemist” is technologically closer to NVIDIA GPUs than AMD.

There is a greater role of fixed-function hardware in the ray tracing architecture, including SIMD innovations such as shader reordering; and the GPU has AI-acceleration hardware just like NVIDIA has Tensor cores. The AI hardware is used not just for denoising, but also to accelerate XeSS. Intel’s philosophy with the software-stack of its GPUs is similar to that of AMD and NVIDIA: to keep things as “open” and accessible to other brands as possible. OneAPI is the overarching software foundation across Intel’s accelerated processing group, just like CUDA, while features such as XeSS are kept accessible to other brands too, via alternative means such as compute shaders.

The higher-end of the Arc “Alchemist” desktop graphics card family is led by the Arc 7-series, with two SKUs, that we both review today: the Arc A750 and the Arc A770 Limited Edition. The A770 maxes out the ACM-G10 silicon that both these SKUs are based on with all 32 Xe cores enabled, and comes with 8 or 16 GB of memory, while the A750 enables 28 out of 32 Xe cores, and comes with 8 GB of memory. Both cards feature the full Xe feature-stack, including XMX AI acceleration, DirectX 12 Ultimate, XeSS, etc., and target the same category of gamers—the performance segment, which plays at resolutions of 1080p or 1440p, with high to maximum details. Intel is targeting the middle-of-the-market segment, as this where most gamers shop for a serious gaming graphics card. NVIDIA sells its popular GeForce RTX 3060, and AMD offers the Radeon RX 6600 XT. In this review we have with us the Arc A770 Limited Edition. This card offers 32 Xe Cores, which work out to 512 execution units, or 4,096 unified shaders. Its 16 GB of memory ticks at 17.5 Gbps across a 256-bit wide memory bus. Intel is pricing the 16 GB version of the A770 at $350. There’s also an 8 GB variant starting at $330.