Positioning & Architecture
This is probably my last review on the 2024.2 GPU Test System. Behind the scenes I'm already working on the upgrade to a Ryzen 7 9800X3D system, with many new games, Windows 11 24H2 and other changes. It's also the last review of an Intel Arc A-Series "Alchemist" card—the successor, "Battlemage," is expected to launch next month, or in early 2025.

With their Arc lineup, Intel finally entered the discrete graphics card market, after leaving the field to NVIDIA and AMD for many years, who had time to strengthen their offerings and position. As you all know, Intel has been playing catch-up, not only in terms of hardware, but also software, drivers, game support, upscaling and other factors, which took some time to get right, but they are heading in the right direction. Looking at the cadence of driver updates, they definitely have that figured out and are doing a better job than AMD when it comes to timely updates. AMD has released ten drivers this year, Intel more than tripled that with 33. Now of course, you could argue that more releases and more betas means that there are more bugs to fix in the first place. If you follow the latest game releases though, you'd have noticed that there were several AAA titles without game ready driver support from AMD, while Intel and NVIDIA had support ready on day one or before.

Released in October 2022, the Intel Arc A770 is built on Intel's Xe-HPG architecture. It features 4096 GPU cores, ticking at a frequency of 2100 MHz. The Sparkle Arc A770 ROC matches these specs exactly, despite the "OC" in the name. Great idea, to call it "ROC," which sounds like ASUS "ROG"—their lineup for enthusiasts. The memory size is 16 GB, which is a standout in this market segment, where 8 GB is the norm. With the Arc A-Series, you get full support for DirectX ray tracing—no capability is missing—all games, even the newest, will run fine.

Performance
Averaged over our whole 25-game test suite at 1080p resolution, with RT off, the Sparkle Arc A770 ROC matches the A770 reference design from Intel almost exactly, which isn't unexpected, given the fact that the same clock speeds are used. Again, I'm puzzled how they came up with "OC," and why they didn't just set the clock speed 25 or 50 MHz higher. Our manual OC testing shows that the card actually has a lot of overclocking headroom, so even +100 MHz or +200 MHz would have been no problem. Against similarly positioned cards from the other two big players, the Arc A770 falls behind. For example, the similarly priced NVIDIA RTX 4060 is 12% faster, and it supports DLSS 3 with frame generation on top. AMD's Radeon RX 7600 is a bit more affordable, yet 9% faster.

We can recommend the Arc A770 for gaming at 1080p, ideally with lowered details settings in demanding titles and upscalers enabled. While this doesn't sound like much, it actually covers a majority of the gaming market. The problem for the Arc specifically, is that it's simply too expensive compared to other alternatives.

VRAM
While both RTX 4060 and RX 7600 have "only" 8 GB VRAM, our benchmark results take that fact into account and the A770 with 16 GB cannot offer a meaningful advantage (at 1080p Full HD). Looking at higher resolutions, we can definitely see that the extra VRAM helps, especially at 4K, where 8 GB VRAM isn't enough for "Ultra" in many newer titles, and A770 is able to beat all the cards mentioned before. The problem is that the framerates are simply too low for a playable experience—15 or 20 FPS—neither is playable. When you use an upscaler like DLSS, FSR, or XeSS, the render resolution is reduced. This reduction lowers the VRAM requirement. As a result, playing at 4K with upscalers will be more similar to playing at lower resolutions in terms of VRAM usage. This means the A770 won't be able to fully utilize its memory capacity advantage.

Ray Tracing
Intel's architecture has good ray tracing support, and it runs faster than what AMD offers. But in this segment, I'm not convinced if RT is worth it. Adding ray tracing effects can significantly affect performance, especially if you're only running at like 60 FPS in the first place. Nevertheless, we tested ray tracing and were impressed by Intel's results. There were no significant issues, crashes, or rendering errors, which is noteworthy for a first stab at a discrete GPU with RT. Technologically, Intel is superior to AMD due to its dedicated hardware units, as reflected in the performance benchmarks. However, NVIDIA's cards, especially the GeForce 40 Series, remain the top performers in ray tracing.

FSR, Frame Generation and DLSS
NVIDIA's biggest selling point for the GeForce 40 Series is its support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation, which promises to double the frame rates. Such performance gains are a significant benefit, allowing you to enable ray tracing at no extra performance cost or to game at higher resolutions, or simply reach playable FPS with a cheaper card. However, this feature isn't available universally and requires game support, most high-profile AAA titles do support it. AMD's FSR 3 Frame Generation is available on many new releases, and it works on Intel, too. DLSS 3 Frame Generation is exclusive to NVIDIA GeForce 40 GPUs though, making it a potentially crucial factor in purchasing decisions if price differences are minimal. For instance, for the GeForce RTX 4060, which is priced similarly to the Arc Series offerings, DLSS is a game changer here.

Physical Design, Heat & Noise
Sparkle's ROC card introduces a new design language that's mostly black, with curved shapes—I like. Despite the "OC" designation, the card is relatively compact and uses a dual-fan design, which ensures it will fit into virtually all cases. The cooler is solid, and achieves good temperatures. Unfortunately, the fan speed is set much too high, which results in a fairly noisy gaming experience. The card emits 39 dBA, making it noisier than all competing models. This is unnecessary since its temperature is just 62°C; had Sparkle designed it with a temp target of 70 or 75°C, it would run much quieter. As expected for a modern graphics card in 2024, and unlike the Intel Arc reference designs, the Sparkle A770 ROC features fan stop, which shuts off the fans while the card is sitting at the desktop, or during light loading like Internet browsing. In our testing, the fans would engage roughly every three minutes, for a few seconds, which can be distracting in a quiet setting.

Power Consumption
Despite utilizing a modern 6 nm process, the Arc Alchemist lineup isn't particularly energy-efficient. It can compete with older models from previous generations but doesn't fare well against modern options like the RTX 4060. The RTX 4060 is highly energy efficient, consuming 128 watts compared to the A770's 243 watts. This excess power consumption also results in more heat, which makes the cooler work harder, resulting in more fan noise and higher room temperatures. At 43 watts, the idle power level is exceptionally high, using 20 times more power than the RX 7600 and three times more than the RTX 4060.

Overclocking
We had great success with overclocking, managing to raise the clock speed from the standard 2.1 GHz to 2.8 GHz. This provided us with a 13% improvement in actual performance, which is very impressive. It's nearly equivalent to moving up a whole tier in performance. I have mentioned this before, so why didn't Sparkle leverage this and configure their card with a higher clock speed out of the box? One weakness of Intel Arc is that memory overclocking isn't supported, which leaves some free performance gains on the table.

Pricing & Alternatives
Priced at $280, the Sparkle Arc A770 ROC isn't cheap. The cheapest A770 costs $250 right now, and even that isn't enough to make it easy to overlook all the shortcomings of the product. If the price was much closer to $200, then the card could definitely be an option for entry-level gamers, especially if power/noise isn't a concern. Noteworthy alternatives are the RTX 4060 ($285), especially because it has support for DLSS Frame Generation. The AMD RX 7600 ($250) is priced competitively, but I'd probably lean towards a used RTX 3070, or used RX 6800/6700 XT if you can find it at a good price point. The coming weeks and month should bring fresh wind to the GPU market, because NVIDIA is releasing the GeForce 50 Series, probably at CES, and I wouldn't be surprised if AMD announced their Navi 4x lineup next month in Vegas, too.

I've been testing both Arc A750 and A770 several times in 2024, and I haven't encountered any issues. Game ready driver support was also top-notch, so Intel is definitely onto something. I'm really looking forward to what Battlemage can offer, and whether that can help break the duopoly on the GPU market that's slowly turning into a monopoly.