the only one more excited for this day to come than me has got to be Intel they
have been hard at work on their Arc series dedicated gpus since at least
2017 when they hired Raja kaduri from
AMD who was leading up their Radeon graphics Division and it's finally
freaking here this is their Alchemist
code name first generation Arc Flagship
the a770 and
it comes with important safety and regulatory information
Nate let's play indeed it's a cute case
badge holy crap this is it
You Gotta Give Them full credit it looks
flipping sick hold on this plugs into a
USB header and this is going to handle the RGB Lighting on your graphics card
that's right a reference card with RGB
is this international power plugs
is this seriously a stand for the card is that what it is is it a stick
oh oh I see why does it come with two bases wait shut up that's their solution
to be able to wall mount it
or wall mount it this way
is to have two completely separate bases
with the power switch in a different spot
yeah I couldn't engineer a better solution but you know what fine oh fatal
flaw we got the top down camera and I have no way of showing it to the top
wait
a solution now the performance embargo hasn't
lifted yet but we can talk about all the detailed specs and Intel has released
enough performance information about this GPU that we can make some pretty
educated guesses first the basics though the arc lineup is divided up into three
five and seven series products just like you would see on their desktop CPUs so
this being an a770 makes it the top
performer of their top series it uses their dg2 512 processor clocked at 2.1
gigahertz that means it has 32 of their XE cores and 32 Ray tracing units it's
equipped with 8 or 16 gigabytes of video
memory that's what makes this the limited edition it has 16 gigs of memory
and that's connected via a 256-bit bus
and it's rated to draw 225 watts of
power which is our first red flag
because Intel says that this card is
designed to compete against NVIDIA's RTX 3060 and AMD's Radeon that's
6650xt both of which draw in the
neighborhood of 160 to 170 Watts also
neither of which use a 256-bit memory
bus that means that especially once we dig in a little deeper and find the
transistor count of this card that Intel was hoping for better performance out of
this GPU more along the lines of a 3070
or a 6700 glass card making matters more
complicated for Intel NVIDIA has already announced their RTX 40 series of cards
however NVIDIA's pricing is so far out
to lunch that if at the price Intel has announced which is 330 dollars for this
card they do manage to be competitive with a 30 60 30 60 TI and if the
overclocking Headroom is anywhere near what they've talked about
Ark could actually end up being pretty competitive I guess we should take a
closer look at the card man did they ever nail the Aesthetics you've got a
diffused RGB strip down here diffused RGB lighting around both of the
fans meant in real life once it's lit it
looks amazing oh do you have a test bench for me right there Bell Events has
got a test bench for me hey thank you so welcome all right let's just uh yeah what could
go wrong uh that could go wrong one thing to note is that probably because
it was intended to come out a lot sooner the art series does not use any of the
new funky PCIe power connectors it just has a standard eight pin plus six pin oh
and that USB is right here is that what
that USB connector is for I don't remember them telling me that it
was for RGB but like you're connected via PCIe can you just do it that way
can't wait to show this to you guys oh after this message from our sponsor
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okay there we go does that look awesome
or what of course there's more to a GPU
than just looks starting with is it even gonna fit in your case so we grabbed a
couple of objects that we can compare our a772 starting of course with our
classic ShortCircuit banana for scale and a little something like that
lttstore.com but also some more useful things
for context here is a 3080 TI this is
the top tier Flagship level card it's pretty big isn't almost as big as a
3080 TI um here's a 36 DTI this is more along
the lines of the kind of Founders Edition card that you might be competing
with in terms of performance it's a little on the long boy side here's our
6700 XT which is actually okay higher
tier card than this one's about the same size which again would give you some
idea of what Intel was actually targeting and you can see this in some of the other specs as well when we
compared the raw pixel rate and texture rate memory bandwidth with something
like a 3060 TI the a770 kinda craps all
over it but because Intel is kind of new
to the driver game when it comes to high performance dedicated gpus
it's speculated that aside from any
architectural oversights there might have been on a first-gen product they
have a lot to learn especially when it comes to optimizing for older especially
DirectX 9 and earlier titles and you
can't not support them because that's part of the beauty of PC gaming is that
you've got this incredible back catalog
of games that you can go back and play even on Modern Hardware that sometimes
does little bit of hackery in spite of all the delays one reassuringly modern
thing about this card is its feature set Intel is claiming that right out of the
gate they're going to have Ray tracing performance that is up to 65 percent
stronger Peak compared to their Rivals the up to Peak that's a lot of
qualifications but hey at least they're going to support Ray tracing right out of the gate and they're going to have
support for XE super sampling xcss which is a competitor to NVIDIA's deep
learning super sampling and AMD's Fidelity effects super resolution using
AI to boost frame rates at higher resolutions how well it works though it
remains to be seen and based on how much work NVIDIA and AMD have already put
into this technology I would say Intel is going to be playing catch-up where
they won't be playing catch-up is in their display interfaces on the back
here we're going to find HDMI 2.1 so you'll be able to do up to 4K
120 hertz or 8K 60 I believe you can do
on HDMI 2.1 and this is where things get really cool this is our first Hands-On
with DisplayPort 2.0 however
unlike previous version of DisplayPort DP 2.0 is not just a cut and dried
here's what you get it's divided up into ultra high bitrate uhbr 10 13.5 I think
and 20. and what those numbers mean is
the data rate times four so these are DP
2.0 uhbr 10 for a total of 40 gigabit
per second ports okay it's a little
confusing kind of which it was just uhbr40 so that that would be a little
more intuitive for normies but in a world where USB naming conventions exist
I guess this is a win another win and another modern feature
is Intel support for av1 encoding and not on this GPU but we have actually
played around with it a fair bit in the last week on Intel arc on the A380 and
it's pretty freaking cool at 3 500
kilobit per second our encoded game streaming footage looks about the same
as NVIDIA's nvank at 6 000 kilobit per
second so what this means is that once platforms like twitch support it you can
expect to be able to stream at the same quality that people can today on a much
lesser internet connection or you can expect to see better quality twitch
streams pretty cool for all my positivity though and as much as I would
love for there to be a valid third competitor in the dedicated graphics
card space I do have to temper my enthusiasm a
little bit because Intel is up against a lot of obstacles they've got to figure
out that backwards compatibility game performance they've got to compete with
AMD and NVIDIA both releasing new series
of gpus when Arc Alchemist was really supposed to be competing with the last
series of gpus and another big one is
that we talk about second-hand gpus a lot and given the recent crypto crash
there's a lot of them out there at very aggressive pricing and the reality of it
is that Intel doesn't have any used gpus
and they certainly don't benefit from selling them so it's going to be an
extremely competitive market they seem pretty confident in their 329 pricing
and I certainly wish them luck but hey
if that doesn't work out for them then it can only be a win for gamers because
they've made them so now they definitely have to sell them just like I'm gonna
sell you uh that you should go subscribe
to LTT while you're subscribing to ShortCircuit so you don't miss our full
review view of this and other Arc
Alchemist cards