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Intel’s Arc series of GPUs has continued to improve following the launch of the A750 and A770 last year, and now these RTX 3060 competitors have hit a new low price point in the US: $199.99 at Newegg.
That’s an awesome deal for an 8GB graphics card that delivers excellent RT performance for its tier, AV1 encoding/decoding and a solid upscaling solution in XeSS. If you’re in the market for a GPU that can handle 1080p gaming with a relatively modern motherboard that supports the Resizeable BAR feature, this is an awesome pickup for the money.
So why is Resizeable BAR pretty much a requirement for this GPU? Well, this motherboard feature allows compatible GPUs to load in memory in bigger chunks, leading to small performance gains on AMD and Nvidia graphics cards, but Arc’s architecture was built around having this technology in place – so performance is dire without it.
However, with Resizeable BAR enabled on a 400-series or later motherboard, you should expect excellent 1080p performance in modern games built around the DirectX 12 or Vulkan API, while earlier DX9 and DX11 titles perform a little worse as these run using a translation layer that converts them into DX12. That results in worse performance in older titles, somewhat countering the usual notion that newer games are more demanding old ones.
Still, Intel has made great strides with their drivers since launch, especially for these older graphics APIs, so I’m more than happy to recommend the A750 8GB at this price – especially as it’s the fetching Intel Limited Edition model.
What do you think – would you go for player three in the GPU war instead of AMD or Nvidia? Let me know in the comments below!