PCGH asks: Our information about the Intel Arc A770 16GB and A750

Arc is coming “very soon,” Intel confirmed in an interview with PC Games Hardware last Tuesday. We confronted the Intel representatives with the most burning questions around Arc and would like to share the answers in a series of articles. Today we are going to talk about the Arc models available at launch, their limited editions, their storage capacity and prices.

As a reminder: With the graphics card market entry of “Team Blue”, everyone involved is starting from scratch – not only Intel, but also testers and consumers. Hardware and software are brand new. Our focus in the first Arc tests and articles was therefore on the compatibility and practicality of the Intel graphics driver, including its Arc Control control center. The benchmark test of an Arc A380 with 35 games marks the high point so far. But this is just the beginning, you can look forward to many more articles in the coming weeks.

Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition 16GB Hands-on (5)

Source: PC Games Hardware

Intel Arc Alchemist: 3 models at launch

The first generation of Arc graphics cards is codenamed Alchemist and, corresponding to the letter, is referred to as the A series. The only model in the wild since its launch in the Chinese market is the Arc A380. The map will also be available in Germany shortly, along with two big siblings: the Arc A770 and the Arc A750. As PCGH learned in an interview with Tom Petersen, Intel Fellow, and Ryan Shrout, Arc Graphics Marketing, interested parties don’t have to wait much longer. No one could or wanted to give an exact date, but we assume that Arc Alchemist will hit the shelves in September. An important pillar for the launch is the AI ​​upsampling XeSS, which Intel has been implementing together with various game developers for months. Updates for over 20 games are currently in development, all of which should be made available in the Arc graphics card launch period – more on that another time.

While the Arc A380 has been well known since our test at the latest, there are still a few myths and rumors surrounding the large Arc A750 and Arc A770 models, which are fully suitable for gaming. We can now clear up most of these, although a few questions remain unanswered. The large model is particularly in the limelight, as it marks the pinnacle of current Intel technology. A fully active ACM-G10 with 4,096 FP32 processors, just as many XMX units (comparable to Nvidia’s tensor cores) and 32 ray tracing units are waiting to accelerate games and applications. Intel continues to make a big secret of the final “graphics clock”, the typical clock frequency in games, and only states in the conversation that you can count on 2 GHz. Much more was achieved during overclocking sessions, but always stayed below 3 GHz. As expected, Petersen, who previously worked for Nvidia for many years, was not lured out of his reserve by our joking request regarding the Tera-FLOPS, so we’ll put it this way for the time being: 2,000 MHz and thus 16 TFLOPS are safe. For an impressive 20 TFLOPS, the Alchemist-G10 would need a clock speed of 2,441 MHz – and if Intel reached this level in series, it would certainly be advertised with it. We therefore assume a typical frequency in the intermediate range. This also applies to the only slightly slimmed down Arc A750.

The interim solution Arc A580, which has been rumored for a while, will not appear together with the A770 and A750. Intel doesn’t give any reasons for this, which is unfortunate, because the conclusive, “hopefully eternal” naming scheme according to Intel has a gap. The plan is to split each Arc generation – as well as the Intel processors – into categories 3, 5 and 7. Whether a 9 will follow is just as open as the release date of the Arc A580 (or alternative A5). In any case, a severely trimmed ACM-G10 is used here, which could compete with the Geforce RTX 3050. A more powerful model based on the small ACM-G11 beyond the Arc A380 is out of the question because there are no additional arithmetic units. Higher performance can only be achieved here through higher clock frequencies and thus power consumption.

Base Specifications. The typical clock rates are usually higher.

What’s next for Intel with the Arc Alchemist roadmap? All information about the exciting Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition, an update to HDMI 2.1 and an outlook on possible custom designs can be found on page 2 of PCGH’s Intel Arc article. So it’s definitely worth reading further.