Intel tests show its Arc A750 GPU beating an RTX 3060, if only you could buy one

Enlarge / Intel's as-yet-unreleased Arc A750 Limited Edition card. The "Limited Edition" GPUs appear to be reference models along the lines of Nvidia's Founder's Edition cards and AMD's first-party graphics cards. (credit: Intel)

Intel still hasn't announced a release date for its Arc dedicated graphics cards, but the company has conducted a PR offensive over the last few weeks to set expectations and preview how the cards are stacking up. In a video and accompanying post today, company representatives Ryan Shrout and Tom Peterson compared the upcoming Arc A750 card to Nvidia's RTX 3060 in a few dozen DirectX12 and Vulkan games They demonstrated that the card is usually able to keep up with the most popular member of the RTX 3000 GPU family.

In a series of tests at 1080p and 1440p, Intel's tests show that the A750 usually comes within a few percent of the RTX 3060's performance, sometimes overperforming (Cyberpunk 2077, Fortnite, Microsoft Flight Simulator), sometimes underperforming (Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Deathloop), and sometimes roughly matching Nvidia's average frame rates (DOTA 2, Hitman 3, Death Stranding). Average FPS is just one way to measure game performance—crucially, Intel didn't provide any minimum or 1 percent low frame rates, which can have more of an impact on how smooth your game feels when you're playing it. But if you take these tests at face value, the Arc A750 does at least appear to be a viable midrange GPU competitor.

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  Intel ran tests in a series of DirectX12 games and compared their average FPS performance to the Nvidia RTX 3060. [credit: Intel ]

Of course, there is one important metric in which Intel's Arc GPU can't compete with Nvidia's: The RTX 3060 is a graphics card you can go out and buy and install in your PC today, and the Arc A750 isn't. Rumors out of this year's SIGGRAPH conference, where Intel has been giving technical demos of its GPUs and announcing a few workstation-oriented Arc Pro products, suggest that we could still see an Arc hardware launch by the end of the summer. But officially, the company still has no news to share about a concrete launch window.