Intel has released 48 benchmarks that show its upcoming Arc A750 GPU should be able to trade blows with Nvidia’s RTX 3060 running modern games. While Intel set low expectations for its Arc GPUs last month, the company has now tested its A750 directly against the RTX 3060 in 42 DirectX 12 titles and six Vulkan games.
The results look promising for what will likely be Intel’s flagship GPU later this year. Intel has tested the A750 against popular games like Fortnite, ControlY call of duty: war zonerather than the handful of curated benchmarks the company released last month.
“These are all titles that we chose because they are popular,” explains Intel Fellow Tom Petersen in the Intel reference video. “Either reviewers are using them, or they’re at the top of the Steam poll, or they’re new and exciting. These are not cherry picked titles.”
We’ll have to wait for independent benchmarks, but based on Intel’s testing, it looks like the A750 will comfortably compete with Nvidia’s RTX 3060. “You will see that we are exchanging blows with the RTX 3060,” says Petersen. “Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose.” Intel’s performance is, on average, 3-5 percent better than Nvidia’s when winning on titles running at 1080p.
On the 1440p side, it looks like Intel wins in more benchmarks. On average, that’s about a 5 percent win over the 42 games. Intel has also tested six Vulkan titles, where it seems to be trading blows with the RTX 3060 once again.
“We’re mostly winning at 1080p and mostly winning at 1440p with Vulkan,” says Petersen. “On average, I’d say this is more like a 3 to 5 percent, maybe a little more toward the 5 percent win rate in Vulkan.”
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Intel has only focused on modern APIs here, and not previous DirectX 11 games. Early tests of Intel’s Arc A770 GPU, a step up from the A750 in the Arc line, showed a huge performance gap. between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 gaming. Intel is still working on its Arc GPU drivers, and it might be some time before the company can improve DirectX 11 performance.
Intel ran these latest benchmarks on identical systems running its Core i9 12900K CPU and 32GB of DDR5 memory. Intel used its own engineering driver and Nvidia’s 516.59 driver for comparisons. Arc GPUs will require 10th Gen or newer Intel processors, or AMD Ryzen 3000 CPUs and above, all with motherboards that support Resize BAR (or, as AMD calls it, Smart Access Memory). Resizable BAR is a key performance requirement on Arc GPUs.
We’re still waiting for Intel to launch its Arc A750 GPU later this year, but these latest benchmarks show that it could be ready to compete for the major mainstream. Intel has yet to announce the official specs or price for its Arc A750, but leaked slides put it at between $299 and $399.
Intel will need to hit a price point that can compete with Nvidia’s $329 price for the RTX 3060, particularly now that GPU stocks have improved a lot and there’s the option of AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 XT at $379.
Now all eyes will be on Nvidia’s plans for its RTX 40 series of GPUs. Nvidia recently slashed the prices of its higher-end RTX 30-series GPUs, and the discounts could indicate that the RTX 40-series will launch in the coming months. Rumors had suggested that the RTX 4090 could launch as late as last month, but July came and went with no new GPUs.
Considering Nvidia’s latest preliminary earnings (an over $1 billion drop in gaming revenue), it’s unlikely the RTX 40 series will be priced low when it finally launches. Nvidia is likely to still have plenty of RTX 30-series cards after a drop in crypto demand, so Intel could be well-positioned to compete later this year if it can get a handle on its drivers and pricing.