Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition

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- JARRED WALTON

AS IMPRESSIVE AS Nvidia’s RTX 4090 is when it comes to raw performance, the Intel Arc A770 may even be more surprising in many ways. After the disappointing A380 (see November issue), its bigger sibling the A770 delivers a compelling set of performance and features at an aggressive price. There are some growing pains with Intel’s graphics ambitions, such as the drivers that may not always work correctly and will likely leave some untapped performance on the table. But Arc is here and it’s mostly good.

Intel took a long, hard look at Nvidia and appears to have told its engineers to match or exceed the RTX cards on every major feature. Along with the expected GPU cores, the Alchemist architecture packs XMX cores (the equivalent of Nvidia’s Tensor cores) and Ray Tracing Units (RTUs) that square off against Nvidia’s RT cores. DLSS also gets an AIpowered upscaling solution with XeSS. Intel hasn’t gone after the pinnacle of the GPU hierarchy, but instead is looking to carve out a slice of the mid-range pie.