Hardware Unboxed tests Arc A770 in 250 games

A large-scale test of Intel’s fastest discrete GPU.

Intel launched the Arc A770 and A750 graphics cards nearly 20 months ago. If not for issues and challenges with graphics driver optimizations, the series would already be celebrating its 2nd anniversary. Intel has made significant progress with their drivers, and their frequent updates, often more frequent than AMD’s and NVIDIA’s, are showing substantial gains in performance. Typically, these gains are impressive because the cards initially struggled to maintain playable framerates.

But how does the Arc GPU series look in 2024? Has the experience improved? Are there any major issues? And what is in store for Intel in the future? Hardware Unboxed published an insightful video that may provide clear answers. They tested 250 games , which is extremely rare for a graphics review. This is not a full GPU testing as seen in typical reviews but a general overview of graphics card support, performance, and any encountered issues.

Hardware Unboxed used the Arc A770 graphics card for this test, the flagship Alchemist model featuring 32 Xe-Cores and 16GB VRAM. They used the latest drivers and a fully supported platform (Intel has specific recommendations, such as the requirement for ResizableBAR). They used the latest 32.0.10.5762 driver.

Hardware Unboxed Arc A770 testing (250 games):

• 93% (233) were playable (which defines typically above 40 FPS)
• 87% (218) worked without any major issues
• 5% (12) not playable (launch or performance issues)
• 2% (4) did not work at all (Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, Sim City 4, Left 4 Dead 2, Saints Row 2)

Arc Game Compatibility List, Source: Hardware Unboxed

In short, out of 250 tested games, 218 worked without issues, while 233 were considered playable, and 5% were unplayable. The surprising detail is that, contrary to expectations, it’s not the older titles that are more likely to show problems, but the newer ones like Alan Wake 2 or Starfield. The latter has been Arc’s Achilles’ heel; the company has never managed to fully optimize their graphics architecture for this game, despite numerous updates. Intel has focused a lot of effort on supporting older graphics APIs, so seeing newer games as less likely to perform better is a surprise.

The vast majority of games were able to run on maximum, ultra, or high settings, some requiring help from upscaling. Only a few games had to use toned-down graphics settings. An interesting issue encountered with games that did not work is that they would often force the use of the integrated graphics solution in the CPU (AMD’s or Intel’s) rather than the discrete graphics card itself. This may seem like an easy fix for Intel or game developers if possible.

Arc Game Settings, Source: Hardware Unboxed

Intel will soon launch its Core Ultra 200V series, codenamed Lunar Lake, equipped with Xe2-LPG architecture. This low-power integrated graphics design is derived from the Xe2-HPG architecture, also known as Battlemage. This architecture is not expected to hit the shelves until 2025, but all progress with the software will already apply to Xe2 as well.

Starting this year, Intel also has its own gaming handhelds powered by Xe-LPG. MSI has become the first major company to use Intel for their gaming device, and the company has plans to upgrade their devices to Xe2-LPG as well. The pressure will grow on Intel because their GPU platform will no longer apply just to discrete graphics.

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