Intel’s Flagship Arc A770 Graphics Card Tested In Games & Overclocking

Intel has recently provided tech blogger Linus Sebastian from the YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips with its top-end Arc A770 graphics card to have the first gaming tests.

For starters, Sebastian tested the gaming performance of Intel's flagship GPU comparing how The Shadow of the Tomb Raider runs in DirectX 12 mode and how it works with DirectX 11. It turned out that the frame rate in the game with DirectX 11 was half of that with DirectX 12. The test confirmed that Intel graphics cards have issues in games that use the previous generation graphics API.

"The thing is, in those earlier versions of DirectX, to ease development, there are loads of APIs and driver baggage between the game and the GPU," Sebastian explained. "The performance can obviously still be good, but it takes a lot of tweaking in the drivers and the game before it all works great."

In the video, Intel, however, clarified that there will be three Tiers of optimizations for Arc GPUs. In Tier 1, the graphic cards will deliver the "best-in-class performance" – these are optimized modern games that use DX12 or Vulkan like Cyberpunk 2077, Control, and F1 2021. The second Tier is less optimized games running on DX12 or Vulkan. Finally, Tier 3 is unoptimized titles that are running on older APIs, and performance in these games is going to be much worse than the competition.

According to Intel graphics engineer Tom Petersen, Arc A770 is set to outperform AMD and NVIDIA in terms of price to performance in the so-called "Tier 1" titles.

It also became known from the video that the base clock frequency of the Arc A770 is 2.5 GHz, and the power consumption level is 190 watts. The blogger also experimented a little with overclocking the GPU through the Intel Arc Control utility, but company representatives noted that at present the program does not always display the indicators correctly.

Sebastian tested the majority of the performance within Cyberpunk 2077 and F1 2021 which delivered a satisfactory experience at 1440p, however, after overclocking, the games brought a smoother experience.