Intel is slashing the price of its Arc A750 graphics card in an attempt to knock Nvidia’s popular RTX 3060. Starting today, the Arc A750 starts at $250 for Intel’s limited-edition model.
As you can read in our Intel Arc A770 and A750 review, the card narrowly beats the RTX 3060 at 1080p, while carving out a bigger lead at 1440p. The price drop results in a $40 reduction in the price of the A750, tipping the scales in Intel’s favor.
Intel claims the A750 offers 52% more value considering its price and performance compared to the RTX 3060. However, Intel based this assessment on a starting price of $391 for Nvidia’s GPU. At press time, you can find new RTX 3060 graphics cards in stock starting at $340. Based on that, the A750 delivers almost 39% more performance per dollar.
The main hurdle for Intel’s Arc Alchemist GPUs has been DirectX 9 performance. Near launch, Intel announced that it would not directly support DirectX 9, relying instead on emulation. This had a big impact on DirectX 9 games, such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Stellarisas confirmed by the reviews.
However, Intel claims to have made great progress with DirectX 9 since its launch. Along with the price drop, Intel is releasing a new driver that further improves the performance of DirectX 9.
Compared to the driver at launch, Intel claims a 77% increase in Counter-Strike, a 45% increase League of Legends, and a jump of 10% Guild Wars 2. On average, Intel claims the A750 is 43% faster in DirectX 9 games than it was at launch.
Intel says it has also made progress in DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games, showing a 57% increase Warframe. Intel clarified that it was specifically targeting Warframe for optimization, however, so you shouldn’t expect such a big leap in other DirectX 11 and 12 titles.
While these are impressive claims, it’s important to wait for third-party testing. Now that Intel’s latest driver is available, we can put the Arc A750 back on the test bench to see if the performance jumps are as big as Intel says.
GPU prices have dropped significantly over the past year, but budget options are still scarce. At $250, where the Arc A750 now lands, the only other option is AMD’s RX 6600. It’s a solid GPU, but it lags behind the Arc A750 in ray-tracing performance, as you can read in our RX 6600 review.
Starting with the price drop, Intel is also offering new Arc GPUs with codes for Nightingale and Settlers: new allies.
Editors’ Recommendations