Intel Arc A750 Limited Edition

Reviews
Intel Arc A750 Limited Edition

We've looked at Intel's best graphics cards to date, now let's look at something more affordable: The Intel Arc A750 doesn't pretend to be best in class when it comes to frame rates, but it's not asking the highest amount either. level graphics card helps to keep graphics card prices down in an era when buying a graphics card can be quite expensive. For this reason, the Arc A750 is perhaps more important than its pricier siblings.

The Arc A750 offers a moderately cut-down version of the Arc A770's GPU, the G10, detailed in our Intel Arc A770 review (opens in new tab) The G10 is a component of the Xe-HPG architecture, a 28 Xe core which is only 4 less than the Arc A770's 32 Xe cores. So while it is not far off the pace of the Arc A770 in terms of performance, it runs slightly slower and has half the total memory capacity.

The included 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM is sufficient for the A750's target resolution of 1080p and, as our tests show, often delivers a steady 60fps even at 1440p. Pairing this card with an FHD or QHD monitor would definitely not hurt; even at 4K it is surprisingly close to the Arc A770, but neither card can approach a stable 60fps at this demanding resolution.

Intel's Alchemist GPU architecture also performs best in games that use the DX12 or Vulkan APIs. This is because Intel's driver packages are focused on providing the best performance with the latest games first, and are still working on making older games that use older APIs, such as DX11, work as well. Intel's graphics boss Raja Koduri said that the company's drivers will "get there" (open in new tab), but Intel has previously acknowledged that this process takes time.

This is one of the things to consider about this graphics card and its impact on the day-to-day gaming experience, although some older competitive and service games, such as Destiny and League of Legends, still use DX11, Most newer games have long since moved to DX12 and Vulkan, and while League of Legends and CS:GO will not require much graphics performance, it is still not ideal to leave a lot of performance unused for some games.

Another thing to consider with this GPU is that to get the best performance out of it, you need to have Resize BAR support on your CPU and motherboard If you are using a modern CPU from Intel or AMD, you will need to use the 10th generation or Ryzen 3000 generation and back, there is no problem. However, if you are using anything earlier than that, you will not be able to get the full performance out of this card. In my tests, the A770 dropped 22% at 1080p with Resize BAR disabled, and the A750 will be similarly affected.

This is a deal-breaker. If you can't enable Resize BAR, don't buy this card.

Then you're better off buying a competitor's card, AMD's Radeon RX 6600 (open in new tab) and Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3050 (open in new tab), both of which offer superior GPU architecture at a lower price.

The RX 6600 is the real thorn in the side of the A750. This card was supposed to be the most expensive of the lot, with an initial MSRP of $329. However, nothing comes close to this price tag today, and even $250 is on the market. At these prices, both the Arc A750 ($289) and the RTX 3050 ($300) appear relatively expensive.

1080p Performance

The Arc A750 typically records average frame rates comparable to the RX 6600 for most 1080p games. The exceptions are "Metro Exodus," which is very well optimized for Intel Arc, "Assassin's Creed Valhalla," which runs best with AMD's RX 6600, and "Far Cry New Dawn," which also favors AMD silicon.

These two cards matched up quite well when benchmarks were run at 1080p. However, the RX 6600 does not necessarily work in Intel's favor when it is less expensive.

1440p Performance

Instead, it is at 1440p that the Intel Arc A750 gets its big break; even in "Assassin's Creed Valhalla," the Arc A750 slightly outperformed the RX 6600. Even in "Far Cry New Dawn," it approaches parity with the RX 6600. In general, performance at 1440p is a cleaner image, so if that is your target resolution, you may find the Intel A750 appealing. However, fans of real-time ray tracing may find it even more convincing.

4K performance

Raytracing performance

Composite benchmark performance

The Arc A750, surprisingly, is just as good at ray tracing as the Arc A770; the Arc A750 is not quite Nvidia's RTX 3060, but not far behind. This is Intel's first generation ray tracing unit, which is quite impressive considering that the company has had no time at all to catch up to Nvidia's much more mature RT core. That said, ray tracing is still a very demanding graphics feature, and we highly recommend turning on some sort of upscaling technology to take advantage of it on this card.

Intel's proprietary XeSS upscaling technology is particularly effective at boosting performance on Intel's Arc GPUs, thanks to XMX acceleration on the GPU. However, AMD's FSR also works great.

In terms of overall performance, Intel's Arc A750 is certainly competitive at this price point; AMD's RX 6600 beats the competition at 1080p and is clearly the better cost-performance option at this resolution, but at 1440p with ray tracing There is much to be positive about the Arc A750 with enabled The architecture and memory (perhaps the card's higher memory bandwidth versus the competition) puts it in a more favorable position for QHD gaming.

There is no doubt that the Arc A750 is simply a better graphics card than the RTX 3050, even in games like "Total War: Three Kingdoms" where Nvidia's RTX 3060 significantly outperforms the Arc A770 Arc A750; the RTX 3050 only slightly outperforms the Arc A750.

Heat and Power

The Arc A750 Limited Edition is going to be a formidable cooler on this card. Despite the card's very high relative power consumption, it is quiet and cool without costing a penny more than the MSRP. I'm sure third-party manufacturers will come out with solid designs, but I wouldn't turn my nose up at the Limited Edition trim. Unfortunately, it doesn't come with the flashy RGB LED lights of the Arc A770, which is beautiful to look at, but still great in its own way.

So would the Arc A750 be satisfactory for the money? Performance is mostly fine at 1080p and quite competitive with the competition at 1440p. In general, however, I think the same can be said for this card as I did for the Arc A770 review. For a first-generation GPU, that's pretty high praise.

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