Intel is officially announcing pricing for its top Arc graphics card today. The top-of-the-line Arc A770 will arrive on October 12th, starting at $329. This price matches that of Nvidia’s RTX 3060, a card that the A770 is expected to comfortably outperform.
“We’ve been seeing that for a long time the price of GPUs is right in this $200–$300 range, but what’s happened in the last few years is that they’ve gotten super expensive,” says Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger. “You should be frustrated because you are losing out as the gaming community, and today we’re fixing that.”
The A770 will include up to 16GB of GDDR6 memory, a 2100MHz clock, and 32 Xe cores. Intel hasn’t released full benchmarks for the A770 yet, but it shared some recent results that show its A770 outperforming the RTX 3060 in ray-traced games at 1080p. Intel now says it will have 65 percent better ray-tracing performance compared to “the competition.” Rumors suggest it could have performance between the RTX 3060 Ti and the RTX 3070 at 1440p, but we’ll need to see independent benchmarks to find out.
When we reviewed the RTX 3070 two years ago, we called it the sweet spot for 1440p, so it will be interesting if Intel can come close to matching Nvidia’s performance at $329 instead of the $499 retail price of the RTX 3070.
Now that we have a date for Intel’s top Arc GPU, we’re still waiting to hear more about the rest of the Arc line. Intel did release 48 benchmarks last month showing that its upcoming Arc A750 GPU, which is slightly less powerful than the A770, should be able to trade blows with Nvidia’s RTX 3060 running modern games. Intel initially set its expectations low for its Arc GPUs, but the company has tested its A750 directly against the RTX 3060 across 42 DirectX 12 titles and six Vulkan games, and it seems to perform well.
We’ll have to wait for independent reviews, but Intel says A770 cards are going out to reviewers right now, so expect to hear more about benchmarks very soon. Until then, the Arc A770 will be available on October 12th, priced at $329.