Intel is finally entering the mainstream video card market with its Arc 770 graphics card. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced the new GPU along with its Raptor Lake processors at the company’s Intel Innovation Conference on Tuesday. The pricing for A770 will start at $329, putting it directly head to head with Nvidia’s RTX 3060 and AMD’s RX 6600 XT.
The A770 follows up on the Arc A380 which was launched exclusively in China. The A380 faced harsh criticism from reviewers. Poor performance and driver stability issues in AAA games plagued the card at the launch.
Arc A770 packs some serious punch as evident by its specs. It comes with 4096 shading units, 32 Xe cores, 512 Intel XMX engines, 32 ray tracing units, and a 256-bit memory bus that supports bandwidth all the way up to 500 GB/s.
The GPU has a TBP (Total Board Power) of 225W and is clocked at 2.1GHz. There will be two variants of this card – one with 16 GB GDDR6 memory and the other one with 8GB of slightly slower memory. Though it is still unclear whether the $329 price tag refers to the 8GB variant or the 16 GB one.
The CEO also claimed that the A770 can perform 65% better at ray-tracing than the “competition” although no specific cards were mentioned as rivals. Intel previously released a video comparing the RTX 3060’s ray tracing performance with A770. So it is safe to assume that Gelsinger is considering the Nvidia RTX 3060 as the main competition.
Gelsinger confirmed that the review units of the Arc A770 are on the way to the reviewers. We shall find out soon enough how good the new Arc A770 really is once the reviews start coming out.