Wednesday, February 1st 2023
Intel Confirms Arc A750 Price Cut, Claims Big Performance Gains as Drivers Mature
Intel confirmed the price-cut for its Arc "Alchemist" A750 performance-segment graphics card that we earlier reported. The company also gave us a quick heads-up of just how far along the Arc 7-series graphics cards have matured in performance and features, over the months of driver updates. In particular, the company focused on how performance of the A750 is about 43% higher than it was at launch in DirectX 9 titles—an API the Xe-HPG graphics architecture doesn't natively support.
Intel relies on a combination of D3D9 to D3D12 API translation, and game-specific optimization at the driver-level, to play DirectX 9 games. The company has been optimizing popular DirectX 9 titles over the past several months, and put out performance gains in a new presentation. Since launch, Intel has added XeSS support to over 35 games, and promises to expand the list. With its starting price now at $249, one can expect custom-design boards, such as the ASRock A750 Challenger OC and the GUNNIR A750 Photon, to be priced at or under $300, although the reference-design Intel A750 Limited Edition cards can be found in some places. Intel also announced that it is bundling "Nightingale," and "The Settlers: New Allies" with pre-built desktops that combine 12th Gen or 13th Gen Core desktop processors and Arc A750 graphics cards.
The complete slide-deck follows.
Intel relies on a combination of D3D9 to D3D12 API translation, and game-specific optimization at the driver-level, to play DirectX 9 games. The company has been optimizing popular DirectX 9 titles over the past several months, and put out performance gains in a new presentation. Since launch, Intel has added XeSS support to over 35 games, and promises to expand the list. With its starting price now at $249, one can expect custom-design boards, such as the ASRock A750 Challenger OC and the GUNNIR A750 Photon, to be priced at or under $300, although the reference-design Intel A750 Limited Edition cards can be found in some places. Intel also announced that it is bundling "Nightingale," and "The Settlers: New Allies" with pre-built desktops that combine 12th Gen or 13th Gen Core desktop processors and Arc A750 graphics cards.
63 Comments on Intel Confirms Arc A750 Price Cut, Claims Big Performance Gains as Drivers Mature
When I work on my software all of my clients get updates on the core system even if only one is paying for something new. It is very possible to implement certain things that make improvements for many other games not explicitly tested. Sure, other games won't get as much or even any explicit treatment though when was the last time AMD or Nvidia did driver optimization for DirectX 9 games? Plus, at some point you're going to need to upgrade any way. Just a lot of pointless negativity from your post. :shadedshu:
chrcoluk is right in asking the same question many of us who prefer older games have : "it's great to see that Intel doubled the FPS in 13x hand-tweaked DX9 games but how many more of the literal thousands of games on this list won't get the same special treatment?" (ie, will run either a lot slower or even have compatibility problems due to issues that often occur with wrappers, but will also fly under the radar of tech sites to bother testing anything outside "the bubble" of the usual 15-30 mostly DX11-12 games plus the odd 1-2x DX9 cherry-picked "showcase" titles like CS:GO. Seeing the gargantuan disparity between this and this is exactly why a whole lot more testing is needed outside of a handful of cherry picked hand-optimised titles.
is this already the end for arc gpu?
looking foward to seeing more intel gpus in the future..
Intel brutally misfired and they're now fixing it. Fixing is good. But its a fix. And to be honest, it feels more like salvaging what's left because the clock keeps ticking and new cards get released. Not a fantastic approach that promises Intel becomes a serious competitor in the gaming space. Yes, they sell a completely failed GPU with meagre stability for 350. So now they're excused? It really depends on your perspective here - your nearly naive optimism is just one of them. Because lets face it: if Intel reaches perf parity they will reach price parity too. Stop fooling yourself and trying to fool others. This is a simple case of you get what you pay for. The card costs 350 because it doesn't compare to a card still costing 500+ today.
Your story wrt Intel now is the same narrative we heard and read for decades regarding ATI/AMD. Oh the poor underdog... Look at what that dog's doing today with half successful product lines. They're following Nvidia in pricing, while launching products with less features and more launch issues. In CPU, they're leading not only in perf, but also in price; Intel is budget king on a large part of the stack now. Meanwhile, market share is at an all time low. Could you elaborate on the logic there and how vouching for the underdog has helped us? No amount of r/AMD noise or fanboy posts on a forum has had any traction on whether or not AMD waited a good 10 years before releasing Zen. That's just their business strategy, nothing else, combined with a design win. None of that originates from 'customer fanbase'.
Look at Windows. The very moment it wants to axe old stuff, the community destroys the idea. The same thing applied here - Intel completely misfired, even if it made every sort of business sense to emulate older APIs. Even Windows has these moves though (phasing out or emulating things), but only when the performance and stability are identical or better. Think of Dosbox.
Problem with gaming is and always will be that its a realtime application, every ms counts. Its part of the reason why it takes so long to get good perf out of a PS3 emulator as well. Even if you throw lots more hardware oomph against it, you'll still find some problems and inconsistencies that can kill the experience.
Somewhere in the past behind Dx9 are even older versions that no one even mentions or requires to be supported anymore.
This hooks into a fundamental issue with continued software development: the old world gets lost, and with that, history is lost, even if it contains valuable technology or lessons, or is just simply an important part of our historical context. Communities, piracy among them, pick up those pieces to preserve them, and we should be happy they do. It'll be interesting how that works with a world of always online application requirements and brutal greed.
I've mentioned Dosbox. Its an example of where you don't need to run the ancient OS to get DOS functionality.
Intel does something very similar with DirectX support for games, except their implementation of 'dosbox' is quite simply abysmal.