All seemed great when Intel announced it was entering the GPU market with its own Xe platform which was fully scalable which meant great performance at a very competitive price, especially for those who couldn’t afford to spend a few months a year For people who buy a new graphics card at the rental price.
First, Nvidia’s RTX 3070 performance is said to be on target, then RTX 3060 as Intel’s Tom Peterson says “You will get significantly higher than 3060 performance. More specifically, he promises gains of up to 17% depending on the specific model/version. Peterson was quoted as saying the price would be lower than the RTX 3060 as well, but didn’t specify by how much – to be fair, what we have here isn’t an Intel card, but a third-party card, which is almost always more expensive.
Due to a few more cores, the A770 version should be faster than the A750″ faster”. 28 Xe cores vs. 32 Xe cores, to be exact. Note that there are different versions of each card, and while the model tested was a 16GB VRAM model, there are also models with only 8GB.
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As many of you may have heard, let’s call it, there were issues when the card first launched. Whether this delays third-party cards is hard to say, but this enhanced Acer Predator Bifrost version of the A770 should perform more or less as well as Intel’s upcoming B-series cards.
The whole Xe HPG platform does hold a lot of promise, including AI upscaling, machine learning, and ray tracing, but I really don’t like the fact that both Acer and Intel use “high performance gaming” and “high Performance Graphics” wording. These cards were launched at a time when the RTX 3060 was the mid-range lineup, we knew about the RTX 4000 series, and AMD’s RX 7000 series is only a few months old and its performance looks to be very good as well.
On paper, things look good. 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM, 32 Xe cores (aka 32 ray-tracing units), 512 vector engines, 2400 MHz boost clock, AV1 encoding, and a normal 2×8-pin power connector all while consuming only 225 watts. The card also features a 256-bit memory interface with 560GB/s bandwidth and 17.5 Gbps memory speed. All in all, things look much better compared to the RTX 3060, which is actually more similar in specs to the RTX 3060Ti, albeit with only 8 GB of VRAM and less memory bandwidth. The A770 has both AV1 and decoding, which is novel.
Price wise – it all depends. Around my local shop, the A770 BiFrost is priced between £399 and £449. At best, the RTX 3060 can be around 20% cheaper, and even for the 12GB version, the RTX 3060Ti costs the same as the cheapest version of the Bifrost. In all fairness, non-Bifrost A770 cards, available at my local reseller for the same price as the RTX 3060, won’t be as cheap as promised, but we’re still talking almost 40% of the price of an AMD RX 50XT or RTX 4070Ti.
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So, what do you get for your money?
First, a really different cooling system. It uses a combination of a vapor chamber and a 70mm Aeroblade fan in the classic “blower” style as you know it from old GPUs, this time using turbo-like metal blades in tandem with a 92mm curved FrostBlade 2.0 that looks even more Like a traditional GPU cooler, and ensures cool solid airflow through screen doors.
The card is pretty good quality for the price range. The FrostBlade fan is made of half-white translucent plastic to enhance the RGB light, while the rest of the card is solid metal. The chassis is there to increase rigidity, but airflow is obviously also considered.
The software used is the Acer Bifrost Utility application. It works and is user friendly, but maybe a little simpler than I’d like. A USB stick is also included with the driver software, but we installed directly from Acer software because the original A770 drivers were not optimal.
The card consumes only 209.83 watts at full load, with a minimum of 28 degrees and a maximum of 70 degrees at idle. The spec is 40 watts, which is a bit odd. This may sound strange, but it seems to be due to the priority of silence. Since the fans in the computer case are louder, I can’t measure the noise at all, so it needs to be muted.
So, let’s jump to conclusions. The test system is an Intel 13900K-based ASUS Wi-Fi Gaming Plus motherboard, 32GB of 6400Mhz DDR5 memory from GSkill, and all software stored on NVMe 4.0 drives.
All benchmarks are in FPS at maximum possible settings.
3D Benchmark – synthetic benchmark
- Time Spy: 14678
- Time Spy Extreme Edition: 7304
- Speed mode: 2407
- Port Royal: 7413
Total War： Warhammer III
- 1080p：50，4
- 1440 pages: 38, 7
- 4K： 23，3
Cyberpunk 2077 Ultra- no Ray Tracing / Ray Tracing Ultra
- 1080p： 66，09 / 43，68
- 1440 birds: 52, 01 / 32, 32
- 4K： 30，67 / 18，3
Far Cry 6
- 1080p：85
- 1440p： 70
- 4K： 44
The Division 2
- 1080p：92
- 1440p： 73
- 4K： 43
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
- 1080p： 93，9
- 1440p：80，3
- 4K：53，2
Dirt 5
- 1080p： 93，9
- 1440p： 80，3
- 4K：53，2
Red Dead Redemption 2
- 1080p： 86，49
- 1440 pages: 59, 96
- 4K： 41，77
So, looking at the results, and comparing it to the two-plus years of reviews I’ve done of the RTX 3060 Ti, which has half the amount of VRAM, a few things are clear.
The promise of more performance for less money doesn’t hold water. First, it’s too expensive. Second, worse performance – I would expect a brand new card to be at least 15% cheaper than the old one. Instead, we’re looking at the opposite. It performed about 15% worse than the RTX 3060Ti on average, and games like The Division 2 had a 30% FPS gain on the old Nvidia card. I have no expectations for ray tracing or 4K, but the card is billed as a clear choice for gaming at 1080p and 1440p, which isn’t the case.
This card doesn’t come cheap. It’s a very good mid-range card for the price, and it still struggles with five-year-old games at 1440p. Even at 1080p, it’s barely scratchable in some situations, and even fails in a very CPU-dependent all-out war.
How can this be? It has 16GB of VRAM and a brand new architecture. Looking at the 3D benchmark data, it should easily outperform the RTX 3060Ti. It has the raw computing power it needs. In my unenlightened mind, the only answer was the driver. They have been a problem since day one and are clearly still very substandard. The card clearly has the processing power it needs, but it can’t get the most out of it.
That’s too bad, because Acer actually did a pretty good job of cooling the card, but Intel’s drivers – I suspect, are still not up to the task. So unless you really need AV1 decoding and encoding, you’re going to have to look elsewhere for new video cards — a huge leap over the cheapest current-generation AMD and Nvidia cards — that cost more than double the price.