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Intel has released 48 benchmarks that show that the upcoming Arc A750 GPU should be able to pack a punch with Nvidia’s RTX 3060 with modern games. While Intel lowered its expectations for its Arc GPUs last month, the company has now tested its A750 directly against the RTX 3060 in 42 DirectX 12 titles and six Vulkan games.
The results look promising for what will likely be Intel’s mainstream GPU later this year. Intel has tested the A750 against popular games such as Fortnite, Checkand Call of Duty: Warzoneinstead of the fresh handful of benchmarks the company released last month.
“These are all titles we chose because they’re popular,” explains Intel colleague Tom Petersen in Intel’s benchmark video. “Either reviewers use them or they’re high on the Steam survey, or they’re new and exciting. These are not select titles.”
We’ll have to wait for independent benchmarks, but based on Intel’s testing, the A750 seems to compete comfortably with Nvidia’s RTX 3060. “You’ll see we pack a bit of a punch with the RTX 3060,” says Petersen. “Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose.” Intel’s performance is on average 3 to 5 percent better than Nvidia’s when it wins on titles running at 1080p.
On the 1440p side, it looks like Intel is winning on more of the benchmarks. On average, it’s a win of about 5 percent over the 42 games. Intel has also tested six Vulkan titles, where it seems to be hitting the RTX 3060 again.
“We usually win at 1080p and usually at 1440p with Vulkan,” Petersen claims. “On average I would say this is more of a 3 to 5 percent, maybe a little bit more towards the 5 percent victory over Vulkan.”
Intel has only focused on modern APIs here and not older DirectX 11 games. Early testing Intel’s Arc A770 GPU – a step above the A750 in the Arc series – showed a large performance gap between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games. Intel is still working on its Arc GPU drivers and it may take some time for the company to improve DirectX 11 performance.
Intel ran these latest benchmarks on identical systems with the Core i9 12900K CPU and 32GB DDR5 memory. Intel used its own technical driver and Nvidia’s 516.59 driver for the comparisons. Arc GPUs Require 10th Gen or newer Intel processors, or AMD Ryzen 3000 and above CPUs, all with motherboards that support Resizable BAR (or, as AMD calls it, Smart Access Memory). Customizable BAR is an important requirement for performance on Arc GPUs.
We’re still waiting for Intel to release its Arc A750 GPU later this year, but these latest benchmarks show it could be poised to compete for the all-important mainstream. Intel hasn’t announced any official specs or pricing for the Arc A750 yet, but leaked slides put it between $299 and $399.
Intel will have to hit a price point that can compete with Nvidia’s $329 price for the RTX 3060, especially now that its GPU stock has greatly improved and there’s the option of AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 XT for $379.
All eyes will now be on Nvidia’s plans for its RTX 40 series GPUs. Nvidia recently slashed the prices of its high-end RTX 30-series GPUs, and the discounts may indicate that the RTX 40-series launch is set to take place in the coming months. Rumors had suggested that the RTX 4090 could launch last month, but July came and went with no new GPUs.
If Nvidia’s latest preliminary earnings offer anything (down more than $1 billion in gaming revenue), the RTX 40 series is unlikely to be priced low when they eventually launch. Nvidia probably still has plenty of RTX 30-series cards after a drop in crypto demand, so Intel could be well placed to compete later this year if it can get its drivers and pricing under control.