The Intel Arc A770 GPU will go on sale October 12 for $329.

A week after Nvidia pushed ahead with some of the highest graphics card prices, Intel announced its own breaking news: the price of its 2023 graphics cards is a little closer to the ground.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger delivered a keynote at the latest Intel Innovation event on Tuesday to confirm the starting price and release date for the upcoming Arc A770 GPU: $329, Oct. 12.

This price is well below last week’s highest Nvidia GPU prices, but is intended to correlate more closely with existing AMD and Nvidia GPUs in the $300 range. Importantly, Intel claims that its A770, the top-of-the-line product in the company’s first wave of graphics cards, will match or even surpass the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti, which debuted last year at $399 and continues to stick to that price. markets.

While we have yet to personally test a pair of Intel “700”series GPUs, their tape story does point to comparable hardware with 4096 shading units (versus 4864 CUDA 3060 Ti cores), 16GB GDDR6 RAM (versus 8GB GDDR6 3060 Ti) and a clock speed of 2.1 GHz (compared to 1.67 GHz 3060 Ti). For now, initial comments made by Intel to Ars Technica point to better performance in modern games running in DirectX 12, and even better ray tracing performance thanks to a number of hardware features designed to make that performance more efficient in existing DX12 RT games. However, Intel also suggested to Ars that in the short term, 3D software running on older APIs is likely to

Intel has yet to announce a price or release window for its other “700”series GPU, the Arc A750. So far, the company has suggested that this GPU, which has lower specs across the board but is otherwise within arm’s reach of the A770, will be directly compared to the Nvidia RTX 3060 (not Ti).

Before announcing the 770’s price and release date, Gelsinger pointed to a “high-end GPU pricing”chart that showed Nvidia’s mid-range GPU launches after the GTX 650 Ti. “We gamers and I are delivering and hearing complaints about high prices,” Gelsinger said, pointing to the current cost of the RTX 3060 and 3060 Ti models in the wild. “You must be disappointed because you are missing out on the gaming community. And today we will fix it.”

Gelsinger’s presentation included several claims that “Moore’s Law is not dead”, apparently referring to a comment made by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang last week in light of his company’s RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 announcements. Gelsinger even stood in front of the slide about its complete production line of various chips with the wording “Moore’s Law: Alive and Well”. He added: “We will continue to comply with Moore’s Law.”