Intel’s Arc series of GPUs don’t look great in terms of specs and performanceEven the A700 series, which is classified as a “flagship” product, has a big performance gap compared with the competitors’ true flagship products, which makes us wonder: Is Intel bragging too much?
Judging from Intel’s publicity of this series of graphics cards in the past, performance was not its focus. Even before the product was officially announced, Intel repeatedly made noises, saying that its mining performance would not be limited. The boom in cryptocurrencies. But the good times are not permanent, the cryptocurrency has collapsed, and Ethereum, which mainly uses graphics cards for mining, has to be upgraded to 2.0. The original proof-of-work (PoW) has shifted to proof-of-stake (PoS), which no longer needs to rely on graphics cards. to mine. As a result, the supply of graphics cards that were fired by miners in the past has also loosened, and the mainstream graphics cards that are mainly mid-tier have changed from being difficult to find to flooding disasters. Coupled with the impact of second-hand mining cards, the original The factory’s mid-level cards are even more difficult to sell. Intel entered the market at this time, and the “flagship card” launched only has mid-level performance, which is naturally extremely hard. So why do consumers buy this graphics card?
However, the recent economic downturn has caused a lot of losses in the stock market, so it is necessary to think twice about buying a graphics card. For the average person, the budget close to buying a game console is probably the limit of affordable cost when buying a graphics card, which is about NT$10,000. Under this premise, the consumer group selected by the Arc A700 series is very Clearly, its direct competitors are the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 and AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT.
Secondly, the Arc series graphics cards are future-proof products. Based on TSMC’s 6nm process, the number of transistors used is much more than that of the GeForce RTX 3060 and Radeon RX 6600 XT, which gives the Arc A700 series better performance. According to the test, at 1440P resolution, the performance of Arc A700 is better than that of the opponent. At the same time, the Arc A700 is also better than the other two opponents in terms of light tracking performance. With Intel XeSS, a DLSS-like acceleration technology, the Intel Arc A700 becomes this There are few display cards in the price range that can make light-chasing games “playable” at 1080P or even 1440P resolution.
Further reading – a new choice in the mainstream graphics card market, GeForce RTX 3060 and Intel Arc A770, A750 measured comparison
At the same time, the Arc A700 has the strongest multimedia processing power in this price range. Thanks to the state-of-the-art dual encoder and multimedia acceleration unit, its multimedia performance can be on a par with the latest GeForce RTX 4090, with smooth hardware decoding of 8K video streams. The degree is even more than that. Generally speaking, the most burdened work of the graphics card is not gaming, but playing movies. Arc A700 can output smoother audio and video content with lower power consumption. And if you are a multimedia worker, you are often faced with video editing, recording, compression and other tasks. Intel also ensures that its multimedia processing performance can be better than that of competitors of the same level.
In the end, competition is a good thing, and there can be progress only when there is competition. In the past, when AMD was not in touch, NVIDIA once squeezed toothpaste. If AMD did not give up and chased after it, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series would not have been so great this year. performance progress, maintaining its status as the performance king. However, the price of the GeForce RTX 40 series has also risen sharply with the growth of performance. Although Huang Renxun made an excuse, he could not convince consumers, which also discouraged gamers with insufficient budgets. The entry of new players into the market will help to help normalize prices. The Alchemist architecture products of this generation are not perfect. In fact, there are quite a few shortcomings, but the price set by Intel is still reasonable, and the performance of the main application is also good. It can really put a lot of pressure on the opponent.
For example, NVIDIA urgently revamped the RTX 3060 / 3060 Ti and launched the RTX 3060 / 3060 Ti with a memory upgrade to GDDR6X. The performance has been improved to a considerable extent, precisely because it feels the pressure from Intel.
However, if you want to buy Intel Arc series graphics cards, you still have to be mentally prepared. The hardware specifications of the Arc A700 chip are very beautiful, but there are still many problems in the software part that need to be solved. For example, it can only play its full force in DirectX 12 games. or earlier API, the performance will be greatly reduced, but this problem actually comes from Microsoft, because Intel’s driver only supports DirectX 12 games natively, and the older Direct X version is achieved through API analog conversion, conversion The loss of the process is huge, Intel said that the conversion layer is provided by Microsoft, because the conversion process must consume huge CPU processing resources, causing the performance bottleneck of old games, that is to say, the pot of old game performance problems is thrown to Microsoft.
In addition, the notorious ReBAR compatibility issue plagues consumers. On platforms where there is no way to enable ReBAR, the performance of Intel Arc A700 series graphics cards may lose up to 30% or more.
However, support for older games, and ReBAR compatibility, are software issues that can be resolved over time if Intel is determined. But in the end, I have to emphasize that Intel has put a lot of good information on the Alchemist architecture, including larger light-chasing computing units, better multimedia processing capabilities, and AI acceleration and other features that can help in daily work, but these can Whether it is presented to consumers or not depends on the quality of the drivers and whether the developer support obtained is sufficient. In this regard, Intel still has a lot of room for improvement.
