allow me to put on my shill hat for a moment everyone else is going to tell
you what's wrong with Intel's Ark A700
gpus and we're going to need to talk about that too because it's a pretty
sizable list I mean we've got the a770
losing to a card from almost 10 years ago in CS go how
embarrassing but what's this it beats
NVIDIA's 3060 in fortnite it absolutely
murders the Radeon 6600 in Ray traced
games and is available starting at just
around its $289 MSRP something I will never take
for granted again so it's with that in mind that I want to explore a different
perspective one where the benefits of competition May outweigh the risk of
buying into a first generation product
that's right it is time to get blue pilled with me folks or not that one I
meant like Intel blue though I am pretty excited right now
excited to tell you about our sponsor ridge ridge wallet has redefined the
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Intel's a750 and a770 gpus are designed
for gaming at either 1440p with medium details or 1080p Ultra and they've got
NVIDIA's RTX 3060 directly in their
crosshairs or at least now they do their
transistor count and power consumption are both more comparable to the RTX
3070 which would indicate that in fell
well short of their original performance targets and is now trying to make
lemonade out of these lemons but that's not our problem and from a consumer
standpoint they kind of did because at
$289 the a750 may just be the most
silicon per dollar ever in a GPU and
there are situations where it really shows check out this performance in
directx12 games 1080p High has NVIDIA's
36 taking nearly every game by a thin margin but when the resolution gets
cranked to 1440p at medium details it's
Intel racking up small winds nearly across the board and this is against a
card that costs 50 to $100 more even
looking closer The Arc cards continue to impress five and 1% lows are very
comparable to the RTX 360 which means you won't feel any extra hitching or
stuttering in heavy firefights and and while I was concerned that Ark might
fall flat on its face in a rizzen system that wasn't the case at all oh and as an
extra bonus Ark murders the more price
comparable RTX 3050 isn't competition
great this is the point in the video where Intel's employees and shareholders
might want to stop watching cuz we're about to look at some games that aren't
direct X12 or Vulcan in Shadow of the
Tomb Raider ark's performance Falls to nearly half in direct X11 ouch and CSG
go a direct X9 title where Arc feels like a totally different card every time
you start it up with the a750 beating
the a770 sometimes 1440p results being
higher than 1080p results and oh by the
way no matter which card you're looking at they get absolutely wrecked in
performance by the 3050 a flagship GPU
from 9 years ago and probably a competitive Abacus user I mean what
happened to crush Intel's performance in these older titles well in a nutshell
Arc isn't actually running direct X9 games in direct X9 instead they're using
a directx9 to directx12 translation
layer this works because you can turn basically any dx9 command into a string
of dx12 commands which is great for
compatibility but in the process you are adding a
buttload of CPU overhead so much that
any small background task can significantly affect your frame rates
now because of the extremely limited time that we were given to Benchmark Arc
before the Embargo lift we weren't able to test a wide variety of older games
this is actually a strategy that we've seen often when a manufacturer doesn't
want you to look too closely fortunately
we have a solution to that tomorrow we are going to be live for hours taking
requests from our community and gaming side by side on the ark a770 and RTX 360
so you can see how your favorite games run or if they run at all because
nothing at this point is a guarantee Intel told us Point Blank that they knew
about the Performance challenges of Arc in older games and they had a strategy
where they were going to price this generation of cards according to how
they would perform in a worst case scenario or or in tier three games and
I'm not going to go as far as to say that Intel lied which would imply a
premeditated intention to deceive but what I do have to say is that these csgo
results show that they did not follow through on this I mean charitably we
could say that the ark gets half of the performance of an RTX 3060 though at
108p it's more like a third so even if
we're looking at a $400 RTX 3060 these
A700 series gpus should be at most 200
bucks but if we go back to that die siize conversation I mean remember this
is a GPU that is larger than a 3070 and
built on tsmc's Cutting Edge and six node rather than an Intel's own Fab so
they can't exactly give themselves a friends and neighbors discount on the
fabbing so if they went any lower they'd likely be losing money on every card
they sold and it gets even worse
unfortunately for Intel who's trying to position themselves as the scrappy
Underdog undercutting NVIDIA's monopolistic pricing we already have
Scrappy Underdog at home it's AMD and
their radon 6600 goes for about 250
bucks and is able to truly trade blows
with the RTX 3060 without the inp
specific directx12 titles fine print and
although AMD's software hasn't always been fantastic if our Community feedback
is anything to go by the last couple of years have been a real turning point and
their rdna 2 cards have aged like fine wine getting better with each new driver
update I would hope that the same will happen for Ark and we actually have seen
a lot of improvement since its first outing Arc was actually impressively
stable for a first gen product throughout our testing but when it comes
to Raw performance there are clearly some problems here that can't be fixed
without new silicon like Intel's Reliance on resizable bar rebar as we've
started calling it is a feature that allows for much larger more efficient
data dumps between the GPU and the system memory it's only available on
systems from the last few years but for most people that's not really a huge
deal because performance on AMD and NVIDIA cards only improves by anywhere
from 1 to at most about 10% for Intel on
the other hand rebar is basically a NE
necessity performance can end up so bad without it that Intel said in their own
press briefing that if you don't have it you might as well get a
3060 with this in mind then we point blank asked Intel why the heck would
anybody buy an arc GPU over the RX 6600
to which they replied that the RX 6600 doesn't have feature parody with the
a750 when compared to radon 6000 Intel
claimed Arc has much better rate tracing AI acceleration and media encoders that
make it a much closer competitor to the RTX 3060 and okay yeah if you care about
those things they actually have a pretty good point in Ray tracing titles the
a770 is a tiny bit behind the RTX 360
and in Shadow of the Tomb Raider Intel's XE super sampling or XS ended up
performing very similarly to NVIDIA's dlss 2 so yes Intel you do very much
have a leg up on AMD in 100% of the Strand type games on the market along
with the other 20 games that actually support xss but it's clear you'll need
to pull some tricks out of your sleeves to get game developers to adopt xcss
more broadly that sleeve trick by the way is easy on our ShortCircuit hoodie
LTT Store.com it's not just game super
sampling either if you care about AI performance more generally Arc is kind
of excellent and here's why traditionally Matrix operations are done
using a Mac or a multiply accumulate combine which is okay at traditional
workloads but can be pretty slow for AI on integrated Graphics Intel has a
fancier way to math called DP 4A where it takes a 32-bit register and splits it
into 8 bit chunks allowing for four parallel operations to be performed at
once improving throughput by about four times the full fat Arc cards like the
a750 take that to the next level with
xmx which allows you to do multiple multiply accumulates in parallel which
can improve throughput by up to 16 times
in theory and in practice where the a770
absolutely slaughtered the competition in topaz video enhance AI without
running into any of the issues that we experienced in our a370 M review Intel
Arc also supports NextGen av1 encoding
and decoding which is particularly beneficial for streamers due to its much
higher image quality at low bit rates compared to to h264 we actually have a
video coming up that discusses using a low-end Arc GPU as kind of an encoding
co-processor if you don't want to spend $900 on an RTX 47 excuse me sorry I mean
480 12 gig unfortunately in more
traditional h264 and h265 encoding the
RTX 3060 is able to handily embarrass
even the top tier a770 and the same goes
for blender render ing though as a consolation prize Intel was at least
able to beat the 3050 in blender while
AMD continued to make its usual excellent case for never using AMD if
you're a blender artist Intel also made a good case for not using archon Lin for
the foreseeable future sorry guys I know that you had High Hopes but currently
Arc only supports Colonel version 6 and
Intel has said that they do not plan on supporting version 5 meaning that every
stable version of Linux is currently not supported to put this in perspective for
the non-Linux folks out there this is basically like Intel launching a product
but only having drivers for Windows
12 oh one thing I haven't mentioned yet
is that there are both 16 gig and 8 gig versions of the a770 but the reason I
didn't mention that is that Intel is only doing a small run of 16 gig cards
and the a750 is the far more compelling
option anyway at $289 for nearly the the
same performance now thank you for that I'm
going to do something that might surprise you I'm going to ask you you
fine viewer of Linus Tech tips you you Savvy source of tech support for your
friends and family to seriously consider
Arc for your next GPU because somebody
needs to do it and it can't be your friend who's shopping for pre-builts
right now you do not want to help them troubleshoot random edge cases on this
thing but but somebody has to do it
because the last few years have made it clear that NVIDIA has no qualms about
gouging their customers when there's a shortage or no shortage and the thing is
that everyone says they want more competition but then they go ahead and
just buy the NVIDIA GPU and hey thanks
AMD for keeping Team Green honest glad you exist except when you don't keep
Team Green honest because you also like to jack up your prices and sell to
crypto miners so there it is if you're
the technical type and don't mind rolling the dice once in a while I'm
asking you to give Intel Arc a shot you might not get as many FPS but I think
it's safe to say you'll have a more interesting Hardware experience than a
3060 owner will you can even overclock the thing or you could just ignore my
plea and wait for AMD's rdna 3 to drop so you can pick up a GPU that was
designed to take on NVIDIA's 4000 series
instead of one that failed to take on the 3070
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down below if you guys enjoyed this video you're going to want to check out our unboxing of the a770 over on the
ShortCircuit Channel we get into a little bit more depth about the different kinds of connectors on it and
all that kind of good stuff show the RGB lighting up