Intel Arc GPUs just got a huge creative performance boost, but will gamers care?
Intel’s Arc graphics cards are still struggling – and after a very rocky start, the Arc A770 and A750 are finally settling into a decent niche after multiple driver updates. The latest update has resulted in a serious increase in content creation workload, with a whopping 40% increase in performance over the 2022 launch drivers.
In our Intel Arc A750 review, we noted that many of the early GPU issues could be resolved by Intel’s continued driver support, and that appears to be the case here. A selection of in-depth tests from Puget Systems has shown that driver update 4644 provides solid improvements for a variety of creative software, most notably DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere Pro.
While the performance improvements aren’t as significant on every program tested, it’s a clear step forward for Intel – and most impressively, it puts the Arc A750 ahead of the competition Nvidia’s RTX4060 Ti in Premiere Pro. The A750 performs about 16% better than the 4060 Ti – and it’s almost half the price of Nvidia’s card after that Intel has undergone several GPU price cuts.
Is it time to take Arc seriously?
Now I don’t think I’ll buy the A750 or A770 best graphics card available soon (my personal favorite is still the Radeon RX 7900XTX), but this is a clear step forward for Intel over the competition.
The hope is that the second generation of Arc GPUs will deliver a big performance leap across the generations, and while there may have been a lot of teething problems with Intel’s first generation cards, hopefully those will be largely resolved by the time Team Blue comes out. are upcoming ‘Battlemage’ GPUs.
Still, you can’t expect to sell mainstream consumer graphics cards based on Premiere Pro performance alone, and there are still concerns that Arc isn’t a viable investment for other purposes like AI development and gaming. A quick look at the Steam Hardware Research shows that PC gamers certainly haven’t wavered from Nvidia’s warm embrace, and it’s not hard to see why.
Arc GPUs still have some issues running many older games (a problem that is simply not present with Nvidia and AMD cards), and more recently failed to run Starfield at all. Intel also faces formidable opposition in the mid-range gaming market, especially with AMD may be abandoning its high-end GPUs for his next generation.
I would still argue that the A770 and A750, after their price cuts, are among the best cheap graphics cards money can now buy. They’re a good choice for basic 1080p gaming and have now proven to be great value for money in the creative department. I’m eagerly awaiting a B770 – I just hope Intel doesn’t botch the launch this time.