It's been almost exactly one year now since we first released our Intel Arc A750 & A770 launch reviews. A lot of time has passed since then and Intel has made tremendous progress with their driver package. Last year I complained about numerous driver issues and highly apparent bugs. The Intel software team has been hard at work to fix all those and introduced many optimizations to boost performance, frametime stability or compatibility. For example, DirectX 9 performance was improved in February, by an impressive 40%. Just recently, in August, the team announced a driver update that boosts framerates in all the major DirectX 11 titles—20% performance improvement. That's why I've retested the Arc A750 with new drivers, and tested the Sparkle A750 with the same drivers, too, to get an accurate picture for performance expectations in 2023. Recently we've observed several cases where Intel was the first company to release game ready drivers, even before NVIDIA and AMD, which shows how committed their driver team is. Probably even more important is that I haven't encountered a single crash or driver-related issue during testing. Image quality in all games was perfectly fine, looking identical to the output of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards.

Arc A750 and its bigger brother, the A770, are both built on Intel's ACM-G10 graphics processor, which offers up to 4096 GPU cores. The Arc A750 has 3584 of those enabled. Sparkle's Arc A750 Titan OC is a custom-design, with a better cooler and several improvements in terms of PCB design. Instead of expensive VRM components from Monolithic Power Systems, the Sparkle design uses more cost-effective components from uPI, Renesas, Intersil and Alpha & Omega. The number of VRM phases is identical though, which confirms that no compromises were made in terms of VRM power delivery capability. Another important change is that the Sparkle card doesn't have the Realtek RTD2173 controller, which adds HDMI 2.1 display capability (HDMI 2.0 is still supported). These are important cost-savings, especially the VRM changes add up. It's great to see that Intel is supporting multiple VRM controllers in their design, which helps board partners optimize for cost and avoid supply issues. NVIDIA is very good at this, too, but AMD typically only supports a single VRM design, which drives up cost a little bit.

Averaged over the 25 games in our test suite at 1080p resolution, the Arc A750 reaches performance that's comparable to AMD Radeon RX 6600, RX 5700 XT, GeForce RTX 2070 and RTX 3060. There's plenty of competition in this performance segment. For example, the Radeon RX 7600 is 15% faster, Intel's own Arc A770 is 13% ahead. NVIDIA's slowest Ada card, the GeForce RTX 4060 is around 20% faster than A750. Compared to the GeForce RTX 3050, the A750 is almost 40% faster. This places the A750 at the lower end of the the midrange segment of the GPU market—this is where the majority of sales are happening. Most people are happy spending $200-$300 on their graphics card, and Intel's offerings are spot-on to target that crowd.

What's unexpected is that the Titan "OC" reaches performance levels that match those of the Arc A750 reference cards almost exactly. Sparkle confirmed that they are guaranteeing a clocks speed of more than 2200 MHz, which turns into 2398 MHz average clocks in our game tests. Problem is that the reference card can boost, too, it reaches 2394 MHz on average. I guess there's still a bit more work involved to build actual OC SKUs on Intel Arc that achieve meaningful performance gains.

Once you increase the gaming resolution to 1440p, the Arc A750 gains on its competitors. It's now 20% faster than RX 6600, 4% faster than RTX 3060, and almost matching the RX 7600 and RX 4060. It seems that Intel A700 Series GPUs scale better with resolution than the other cards in our test group. While this trend continues at 4K, I don't think the A750 (or any other cards in this segment) are fast enough for 4K, which makes the comparison irrelevant. The Arc A750 is a great card for 1080p Full HD gaming at maximum details, and 1440p at 60 FPS is within reach in most titles, if you're willing to dial down settings somewhat.

All these tests were with ray tracing disabled, and that's what you should be looking for when shopping in the midrange segment. Sprinkling RT effects on top of your game graphics comes with a serious performance hit—making little sense when you're only running around 60-80 FPS, even with RT disabled. We still tested ray tracing, and I'm happy to report that Intel's ray tracing implementation is great. I didn't encounter any serious issues, crashes or rendering errors, which is quite a feat for such a new technology. Technologically, Intel is clearly ahead of AMD, due to the use of dedicated hardware units, which can be seen in the performance benchmarks. NVIDIA's cards are still the kings of ray tracing, especially GeForce Ada.

NVIDIA's biggest selling point for the GeForce 40 Series is support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation. The algorithm takes two frames, measures how things have moved in those two frames and calculates an intermediate frame in which these things moved only half the distance. While this approach is definitely not problem-free, especially when pixel-peeping at stills or slowed down video, in real-time it's nearly impossible to notice any difference. As you run at higher FPS and resolution it becomes even more difficult, because the deltas between each frame are getting smaller and smaller. Being able to double your FPS is a huge capability, because it means you can enable ray tracing for free, or game at higher resolutions. Of course you are limited to games with DLSS 3 support, of which there are currently around 40, mostly AAA titles, but not every title will support it. AMD has released their own FSR 3 Frame Generation technology just a few days ago, Intel is the only player without this feature. While you can run FSR 3 on Intel hardware, too, DLSS 3 Frame Gen is limited to NVIDIA GeForce 40 GPUs, which makes it a desirable feature that could end up being the deciding factor if the pricing differences are small. This is the case for the GeForce RTX 4060, which currently sells for $290—not that much more than $240 for the A750 reference card and $260 for the Sparkle A750.

Intel contracted TSMC to fabricate their new GPU, because TSMC is the only company in the world that has a currently working 6 nanometer production process for desktop-class processors. Such a small process promises great energy efficiency, yet the A750 clearly falls behind the current-gen offerings from AMD and NVIDIA in terms of efficiency. While the A750 is more efficient than the A770, thanks to only 8 GB VRAM instead of 16 GB, and running at lower clocks and voltage, cards from the competitors are still much more efficient. Intel Arc Alchemist rather seems to be on the same efficiency level as older cards like RX 5700 XT and RTX 2070—a bit disappointing. Looking at our voltage-frequency tests, and V-Sync power consumption, it seems that Intel simply doesn't have all the refined power-saving technologies yet that their competitors developed over the decades. I think that's also the reason for the very high non-gaming power consumption. With almost 40 W in idle, sitting at the desktop doing nothing, power consumption in that scenario is 3x as high as on the competitors—which can become a dealbreaker if you're running your PC a lot of hours each day. Gaming power draw is a bit on the high side with 250 W, but nothing that any decent PSU can't handle.

Sparkle's A750 Titan OC looks fantastic, thanks to a clean design that's paired with a refreshing Intel Blue color theme on the main heatsink. The card comes with a large triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution, which does an excellent job keeping the card cool. Noise levels are a tad bit high, mostly because the card's heat output is fairly high, which means the cooler has to work harder. Given that the GPU runs at a cool 65°C, I feel like noise could definitely be much lower. It seems one of the design goals for the Titan OC was to improve temperatures over the Intel reference designs. Personally I would have recommended a more balanced approach that goes for a balance between noise and temperature. Just lower temperatures won't do much for you, other than affect a number in monitoring software—lower noise levels affect your whole gaming session, all the time. I'm happy to report that idle-fan stop works correctly on the Sparkle Arc A750 and the card will stop its fans properly during idle, desktop work and Internet browsing.

Overclocking of our card worked well, no more software issues. I also have to praise Intel for including their own overclocking software, unlike NVIDIA, which basically forces you to use 3rd party apps. We were able to run the A750 Titan OC at 2.6 GHz stable, which yielded a 7% performance improvement. Memory overclocking is not available on this generation of Intel graphics cards. We confirmed with Intel that they will add memory overclocking on future products: "For this generation we focused on enabling GPU overclocking. We will be looking at memory overclocking with the next generation."

Currently, the Arc A750 is listed at $240, the Sparkle Arc A750 Titan OC sells for $260 or a $20 increase (+8.3%). For that price increase you get an improved, larger thermal solution. Unfortunately noise levels are a little bit higher than the Intel card, but temps are much lower. As mentioned before, there's no performance differences to the reference card. The switch from 8+6-pin to 2x 8-pin makes no noticeable difference. While Intel's card supports HDMI 2.1, thanks to the inclusion of an additional chip, Sparkle's design lacks that capability, but still supports HDMI 2.0, which should be sufficient for everyone. Considering these differences I don't think that the Sparkle A750 Titan OC should be any more expensive than the Intel reference card.

Actually, even at $240, Arc A750 won't be an easy sell. There's just so much competition in this segment. For example, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 for $290 offers a very mature solution, with considerably higher performance in rasterization and ray tracing, just half (!) the power consumption and support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation. If your budget doesn't let you go that high, then Radeon RX 6600 XT ($200) and RX 6600 ($170) should be on your shopping list. They offer very similar FPS as the Arc A750, at considerably lower price points, just RT performance is much lower, which probably doesn't matter in this segment. If you're looking for the absolute best price/performance and don't mind the power consumption, then a used Radeon RX 5700 XT is hard to beat. For $150 or less you'll be able to play most games at decent framerates. While I have to congratulate Intel on all their recent improvements on the software side, these comparisons show that Intel must lower their prices considerably. The mining boom is over, and graphics cards are readily available, which makes pricing a major factor again.