Intel Arc A750 benchmarked in nearly 50 games, but there's a catch

We’re waiting patiently (because we have no choice) for Intel to release its Arc discrete consumer desktop graphics card for most markets around the world. Meanwhile, the company continues to try to set expectations ahead of launch with a series of performance measurement videos and media appearances. The latest news is encouraging: it shows a midrange Intel Arc A750 graphics card going head-to-head with Nvidia’s RTX 3060, with a slight lead in 48 selected games.

But Intel played to its strengths in the tests, only running tests on games that offer more advanced DirectX 12 and Vulkan graphics API capabilities. These more modern and common standards have proven to work better with Intel’s Arc cards, both in terms of the company’s Xe HPG graphics architecture and its drivers. The latter is an area where Intel is far behind the duopoly, and it admits it. Intel didn’t show the performance of the more commonly used DirectX 11. This is in line with what Intel has already said.

Tested on a series of recent and persistently popular AAA PC games using DirectX 12, such as Fortnite, Hitman 3, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Warframe, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Forza Horizo​​​​n 5, Redout 2, and Warcraft World , the Arc A750 stayed within the RTX 3060’s competitive range, even beating it in multiple titles. In games with Vulkan, such as DOOM Eternal and Wolfenstein: Younglood , with similar results. Here is the full list of DirectX 12 tests:

Intel

Recall that Intel is splitting its game support into three levels of games, roughly: run well, run well, run like a three-legged dog stable. (Paraphrasing, of course.) The company was surprisingly candid about how the company would fall behind Nvidia and AMD for many of the games whose first-gen graphics cards relied on DirectX 11, and said the pricing of its graphics cards will be based on performance on the lowest level of games it tests. (Even with the kick-ass and name of the world’s first AV1 GPU encoder using Arc).

That should mean that a graphics card like the Arc A750 is priced the same as the Arc A750 Competing graphics cards a step or two below their peak performance levels, namely the RTX 3050 or RX 6600. Whether that’s actually the case will have to wait for the retail release, which Intel has previously said should be sometime later this year.