Intel's Performance Claims

This is Intel's first attempt at a contemporary performance-segment GPU that actually made it to market without leaving out any feature that established players NVIDIA and AMD have (ray tracing, full DirectX 12 Ultimate feature-set, super-resolution performance enhancement, media acceleration, up to date connectivity, display refresh enhancement, and a really nice software package). Intel is clear on who the A770 and A750 are for—someone who games at 1440p or 1080p, or can try gaming at 4K with the XeSS feature enabled. Intel is confident that it has a formidable real-time ray tracing solution that isn't just dropped in to satisfy the D3D12 Ultimate logo requirement, but is technically competitive with NVIDIA RTX.

In addition to this unboxing preview, Intel allowed us to post its own performance claims made in its media presentation. We normally won't post manufacturers' performance claims in previews, because we can extensively test the cards ourselves and tell you how they fare. It's just that Intel is the new kid on the block, the discrete gaming graphics market had a grand total of 2 players before now, and so we'll post Intel's claims here. Our performance review testing is underway as we speak.

In its performance claim graphs—and throughout its marketing really—Intel has been comparing the A770 and A750 with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060. In fact the company is pricing the two aggressively against the RTX 3060, undercutting it by almost $80. Intel's performance claims see classic raster and ray tracing-enabled gaming workloads at 1080p and 1440p. Without further ado, here they are.



According to Intel's performance claims, the A770 offers 42% more performance per Dollar than the RTX 3060 (with the A770 8 GB priced at $329 and the RTX 3060 set at $419); and the A750 offers 53% more performance per Dollar (at its price of $289). What's interesting is Intel boldly posting its ray tracing performance numbers, and claiming them to be superior to those of NVIDIA's. If these hold, Intel will have established a technological superiority over AMD RDNA 2, and will very likely beat the Radeon RX 6600 XT (and perhaps even sneak up on the RX 6700 XT), when it comes with gaming with ray tracing enabled.

The company also claims that XeSS is technologically on-par with DLSS 2 and FSR 2.0, so neither NVIDIA nor AMD can get ahead of Intel using these two features. XeSS is an AI-accelerated super-scaling performance enhancement. The underlying principle is the same as DLSS and FSR—games are rendered at a lower resolution than what your display is capable of; these lower-res frames are upscaled to native resolution using a complex upscaling logic that takes into account motion vectors, and temporal data from previous frames, to attempt to reconstruct details, with the end-result appearing almost identical to native-resolution rendering. Since the game is rendered at a lower-resolution; despite the system resources used in the upscaling, there are net-gains in frame times and frame-rates. Unlike DLSS, XeSS works not just on Arc GPUs, where they take advantage of Intel's XMX matrix-acceleration hardware; but also on GPUs of other brands, using Direct3D DP4a fallbacks. We're allowed to do image quality- and performance comparisons of XeSS against DLSS, just not on Arc hardware yet; so we tested Shadow of the Tomb Raider with it on NVIDIA hardware. You can read all about it here.

Can Intel make a faster GPU than this? Of course it can. This is Intel we're talking about. But its first attempt is focused on the middle-of-the-market, and targets NVIDIA's best-selling SKU from the RTX 30-series, the RTX 3060. If Intel does well, AXG (the Intel business group behind Arc Graphics) can get the corporation to invest more in future generations of Arc, which will only mount pressure on NVIDIA and AMD to innovate more. If there's any company that can unsettle the NVIDIA-AMD duopoly, it's Intel.

BRB

Be sure to check back next week for our full review of the two cards, in which we'll compare them across a broad set of games, and against rivals RTX 3060, RX 6650 XT, among many others; to tell you if the PC graphics industry just got a whole lot more interesting.