Enlarge / The Arc A750 is slower than the top-tier A770, and it's getting a $40 price cut to make it more appealing. (credit: Intel)
It has been about four months since the launch of Intel's long-awaited Arc graphics cards. If you rolled the dice and bought a flagship A770 or an A750 in the interest of getting a decent deal on a mid-range GPU after two years of artificially inflated prices, the news has been mostly good. There have been some weird issues here and there, but Intel has kept plugging away at its buggy drivers, slowly improving Arc's performance across a range of games.
The company is making a pair of announcements today. First, the Arc A750 (the third-fastest Arc card, behind the 16GB and 8GB versions of the A770) is getting an official price cut, from $289 to $249. Second, the company is releasing yet another driver update (version 31.0.101.4086), bragging about widespread performance improvements in old DirectX 9 games and more targeted improvements for newer titles relative to the launch drivers from October.
Intel is using the A750 for these performance comparisons, but the drivers will benefit all Arc GPUs, from the lowly A380 up to the 16GB A770. (credit: Intel)
In our review, the Arc A750 was usually around 10 or 20 percent slower than the 16GB version of the A770, at least for games where the A750's 8GB of memory wasn't a bottleneck. But in the games where it did well, it usually still outperformed Nvidia's RTX 3060, and Intel's driver updates have made the "games that Arc plays well" list a little longer by now. A new RTX 3060 still typically goes for somewhere in the $350 to $400 range.
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