The Arc A770 Limited Edition is absolutely stunning, but it's very hard to find, which keeps it from getting full marks. The introduction of new types of display-sync technology is another trend that has been popular in recent years. The company here has introduced three types of sync for its customers to use to adjust their gaming experience. The first, Adaptive Sync, is nothing new; it essentially works like V-Sync. The second, Speed Sync, aims to rush frames out to the monitor faster to avoid image tearing. The last, Smooth Sync, uses a dithering filter to try and mask screen tearing. my almost 10-year-old 980ti still has it's original fans and it's been used almost 12 hours a day every day.

The situation in Red Dead Redemption 2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider for the Arc A770 is identical to what we saw in Total War: Three Kingdoms. We did run an extra test with the Intel Arc A770 using XeSS, as this is one of the titles that will support XeSS at launch. But we don’t have DLSS and FSR ready for the competing cards in this title. Nonetheless, you can see that using XeSS gives the Arc A770 a considerable boost. That's something the RTX 4060 Ti can't manage thanks to its smaller frame buffer (8GB VRAM), and while the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti could theoretically perform better (I have not tested the 16GB so I cannot say for certain), it still has half the memory bus width of the A770, leading to a much lower bandwidth for larger texture files to pass through. The Arc A770 also has AV1 hardware-accelerated encoding support, meaning that streaming videos will look far better than those with only software encoding at the same bitrate, making this a compelling alternative for video creators who don't have the money to invest in one of Nvidia's 4000-series GPUs. Intel's Xe HPG architecture inside the Arc A770 introduces a whole other way to arrange the various co-processors that make up a GPU, adding a third, not very easily comparable set of specs to the already head-scratching differences between Nvidia and AMD architectures.

An Uncut 'Alchemist' Die

While this card has very solid specs, including 16GB VRAM and a 256-bit memory bus, its hardware is effectively last-gen. You're also getting three DisplayPort 2.0 outputs and an HDMI 2.1 output, which puts it in the same camp as Nvidia's recent GPUs, but can't match AMD's recent move to DisplayPort 2.1, which will enable faster 8K video output. As it stands, the Intel Arc A770 is limited to 8K@60Hz, just like Nvidia. Will you be doing much 8K gaming on a 16GB card? Absolutely not, but as we get more 8K monitors next year, it'd be nice to have an 8K desktop running at 165Hz, but that's a very speculative prospect at this point, so it's probably not anything anyone looking at the Arc A770 needs to be concerned about. XeSS does not have frame generation though, and the matrix processors in the Arc A770 are not nearly as mature as Nvidia's 3rd and 4th generation tensor cores found in the RTX 3000-series and RTX 4000-series, respectively. In synthetic benchmarks, the A770 performed fairly well against the current crop of graphics cards, despite its effectively being a last-gen card. It is particularly strong competition against the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti across multiple workloads, and it even beats the 4060 Ti in a couple of tests.

It’s also important to note that Intel’s Arc GPUs will be arriving late. The company originally planned on formally launching them in the US in Q3, following an earlier delay. However, the Oct. 12 launch date shows the Arc A770 will actually land in Q4.

Our Graphics Card Test Setup

As gamers ourselves, we’ve tried to ask we would buy this card for personal use. It's a perplexing question. There's the novelty factor of running a card that wasn’t powered by an AMD or Nvidia graphics chip. Part of us would worry that the performance issues and drivers wouldn’t improve, though, and we’d later regret the decision.

At the time of this writing, Intel's Arc A770 has been on the market for about a year, and I have to admit, had I gotten the chance to review this card at launch, I would probably have been as unkind as many other reviewers were.Xe HPG microarchitecture is engineered from the ground-up to deliver high performance, efficiency, and scalability for gamers and creators. Intel Xe Super Sampling technology (XeSS) takes your gaming experience to the next level with AI-enhanced upscaling enabling more performance with high image fidelity. XeSS is optimized for Intel® Arc™ graphics products with the ability to take advantage of XMX AI hardware acceleration. Intel’s Arc A770 Limited Edition graphics card clearly has a few rough areas that need to be smoothed over. Based on our limited tests with legacy titles, its performance in older games is not competitive in its price range; its idle power draw is too high; and its overall performance can vary a great deal from one game to the next. Overall, the software is cleanly laid out and provides a good amount of information, including the card's active power draw and usage specs. These settings and others can be adjusted using Intel’s new Arc Control Center program. This program runs as an overlay when open, which prevented us from getting screenshots of it with our A770 card, but here's a look at the Performance section of the software, in use with the lower-end Arc A380...