Intel cuts price of Arc A750 GPU, showing off driver optimizations

It’s been about four months since the launch of the long-awaited Intel Arc graphics cards. If you rolled the dice and bought the flagship A770 or A750 to get a decent deal on a mid-range GPU after two years of artificially high prices, the news was mostly good. There were some weird issues here and there, but Intel kept fixing their buggy drivers, gradually improving Arc’s performance in a number of games.

The company is making a couple of announcements today. First, the Arc A750 (the third fastest Arc card after the 16GB and 8GB versions of the A770) is getting an official price cut from $289 to $249. Secondly, the company is releasing another driver update (version 31.0.101.4086), showing off massive performance improvements in older DirectX 9 games and more targeted improvements for new games compared to the drivers released in October.

In our review, the Arc A750 was typically around 10 or 20 percent slower than the 16GB version of the A770, at least in games where the A750’s 8GB memory wasn’t the bottleneck. But in games where it performed well, it generally still outperformed Nvidia’s RTX 3060, and Intel’s driver updates have made the list of “games Arc plays well”a bit longer by now. The new RTX 3060 is still usually somewhere in the $350 to $400 range.

Driver improvements are mostly old news if you are an Arc owner who installs new updates as they are released; many of DirectX 9’s improvements in particular were announced in the December beta driver update. It appears that Intel is using both DirectX 12 and Vulkan-to-DirectX 9 translation levels, choosing different levels to optimize speed for specific games.

On average, these older games will run 43% faster than with launch drivers, according to Intel. Gameplay should also be smoother and have less lag thanks to lower and more stable frame times.

Improvements for new DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games have been smaller and less widespread, according to Intel. It’s hard to say how much faster they are on average because Intel’s charts sometimes drift into hard-to-analyze measurements like “average FPS per dollar”. But the company’s focus on big multiplayer games (Fortnite, Valorant, DOTA 2, League of Legends) and big releases (Assassin’s Creed, Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk 2077) means that most people probably play at least a few games. which have benefited from the Intel drivers are still working.

In the months leading up to Arc’s launch, Intel went on a pre-emptive apology tour of sorts, explaining several times that Arc’s performance in new DirectX 12 and Vulkan games would be great, but performance in DirectX 11 and older games would either fail or unsuccessful.

It wasn’t the best start for Intel, especially since the Arc was also late to the party – it was designed to compete with the Nvidia RTX 3000 and AMD RX 6000 series, which have already been superseded. Intel also missed a launch opportunity while the 2021 and 2022 GPU shortages were still in full swing. But the explanations did help set expectations, and most GPU reviews were at least mildly positive, though they could have been relentlessly negative.

It’s hard to say whether these efforts have translated into sales, although most signs point to a slow start. As of December 2022, Arc has yet to make it into Steam’s hardware review data and is still being lumped together with “other”. If we use customer reviews as a measure of popularity, the Arc A770 and A750 GPUs combined have 142 reviews on Newegg, while the RTX 3060 GPU listings combined have many times more.