Intel benchmarks show its Arc A750 GPU outperforms the RTX 3060 if you could only buy it

Intel still hasn’t announced a release date for its discrete Arc graphics cards, but over the past few weeks the company has carried out a PR attack to set expectations and see how the cards stack up. In today’s video and accompanying post, company reps Ryan Schrout and Tom Peterson compared Nvidia’s upcoming Arc A750 card with Nvidia’s RTX 3060 in several dozen DirectX12 and Vulkan games. They demonstrated that the card usually keeps up with the most popular member of the RTX 3000 GPU family.

In a series of tests at 1080p and 1440p, Intel benchmarks show that the A750’s performance is typically only a few percent of that of the RTX 3060, sometimes outperforming (Cyberpunk 2077, Fortnite, Microsoft Flight Simulator), sometimes falling behind (Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Deathloop), and sometimes roughly in line with Nvidia’s average framerate (DOTA 2, Hitman 3, Death Stranding). Average FPS is just one way to measure the performance of a game. It’s important to note that Intel has not provided a minimum or 1 percent low frame rate, which can have a larger impact on game fluidity while playing. But if you take these benchmarks at face value, the Arc A750 at least seems like a viable midrange GPU competitor.

Of course, there is one major metric where an Intel Arc GPU can’t compete with an Nvidia GPU: The RTX 3060 is a graphics card that you can buy and install on your PC today, while the Arc A750 is not. Rumors of this year’s SIGGRAPH conference, where Intel presented tech demos of its GPUs and announced several workstation-focused Arc Pro products, suggest we may still see Arc hardware launch towards the end of the summer. But officially, the company still has no news on a specific launch window.

Delays and driver issues made it difficult to launch the Arc. And by failing to bring products to market while the great GPU shortage in late 2020/all 2021/early 2022 was still going on, the company missed an opportunity to build a base to install by selling to gamers desperate to buy any type of GPU.

Intel’s strongest argument for its new GPUs may be its three-tier pricing strategy. The company categorizes games using one of three performance levels: Tier 1 is newer games that use modern APIs that have been specifically optimized for Arc GPUs, Tier 2 is games that use modern DirectX12 and Vulkan APIs but do not have any -or optimizations for Arc. and Level 3 are older names for DirectX and OpenGL. All of the games in today’s comparison are Tier 1 or Tier 2 games, but Intel says Arc’s price will be determined by its competitiveness in Tier 3 games.

Since Arc is fighting games so hard at this third tier, it could mean the A750 will be well below the RTX 3060’s official MSRP of $329 (its current retail price, based on a cursory unscientific check by Amazon and Newegg, is closer to $400).). Early tests showed that the DirectX11 version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider was twice as slow as the DirectX12 version. A card that performs like an RTX 3060 in new games but is priced more like an RTX 3050 or 1650 might be attractive to some bargain hunters, regardless of the other issues Arc is facing.

Arc A750 is the second fastest Arc GPU we know of; the slightly faster A770 will presumably compete with the RTX 3060 Ti or RTX 3070.