Intel’s Arc A750 GPU just got a price cut – and AMD should be worried
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Intel has announced a price cut for the first-party edition of the Arc A750 Graphics Cardbringing the cost down to $249 from its launch price of $289 – just four months after the card was released.
It’s a bold move from Intel, which has yet to gain significant traction in the GPU market through its recently launched Arc series of cards. The Arc A770 and A750 launched last October and while they performed quite well, 2022 was decidedly more of a triumph for Team Blue’s CPUs, while the GPU department went through endless struggle.
The A750 is still the second most powerful card in the current Arc desktop series – although leaks suggest there are more heavyweights ‘Battlemage’ GPUs will arrive in 2024 – and it was already aggressively priced at $289 considering its performance. The price cut is currently only for the US market, but Intel has indicated that similar cuts will follow in other regions.
The A750 is ostensibly a 1080p card (although 1440p is certainly an option in many games), and is in performance competition with AMD’s RX 6600 And Nvidia’s RTX 3060.
While the Nvidia card is slightly ahead on average, it’s also currently quite a bit more expensive; you’ll be lucky to find an RTX 3060 south of $350 right now, despite matching the $330 MSRP of the RX 6600 – a card that far outperforms Intel’s competitor in most games .
Intel is pushing into the budget gaming space, but only AMD should really be concerned
It’s worth noting that we’re comparing the A750 to a pair of two-year-old GPUs. That’s mainly because Nvidia and AMD haven’t actually released any “budget” cards from their respective current-gen lineups, with the cheapest ones released to date being the $799 RTX 4070 Ti.
Nvidia would no doubt view the 4070 Ti as a “midrange” card, with plans for that RTX 4060 and 4050 GPUs to cover budget space later, but let’s face it: $799 isn’t a mid-range price tag. That’s the same price as the RTX 3080, which was decidedly a high-end card when it first launched.
With this in mind, we’re going to make a bold statement here: while the A750 might blow the RTX 3060 out of the water right now, Nvidia just doesn’t care about the cheap GPU market anymore. The skyrocketing prices on RTX 4000 GPUs (combined with constant online scalping exacerbating the situation) shows that Team Green is more comfortable at the premium end of the scale, going all in on his ‘omniverse’ guff for professional creators with powerful – and expensive – AI-powered graphics cards.
AMD, on the other hand, is trying to make itself the choice for gamers, insisting that Moore’s Law is alive and well and that its GPUs won’t continue to see hefty generation-long price increases. If Team Red can’t compete with Nvidia’s performance at the top, the most logical approach is to offer more bang for your buck with more affordable cards instead of.
However, the Intel Arc GPUs have the potential to really throw a spanner in the works there; Team Red has made some serious price cuts on the best AMD graphics cards from the previous (6000 series) generation, and now Team Blue has made an effort to lower the bar even further.
$249 for a very competent 1080p/1440p gaming GPU with solid ray tracing support is actually pretty crazy. The Arc A750 goes hand-in-hand with the AMD RX 6600 (and even the RX 6600 XT) in most games, even beating AMD in ray-traced tests. It does draw a bit more current than the RX 6600, but Intel’s continuous performance improvements through driver updates means the A750 is extremely competitive at this new price tag.
AMD – and possibly Nvidia too – will certainly have a chance to regain some ground in the budget arena this year with lower-end cards from their next-gen selections, but Intel clearly isn’t messing around; for anyone looking to build a basic 1080p gaming PC, the A750 just became the new best choice.