If you’re one of those who think 8GB cards are dead today and 12GB cards will be dead in two years, the Intel Arc A770 graphics are the cheapest 16GB cards you can buy today. Otherwise, it’s no longer as cheerful, but not as bad as it seemed from the reviews at launch.
The Intel Arc A770 and A750 graphics cards are Intel’s first major foray into the discrete gaming graphics card market. The last time Itel tried something like this was at the end of the nineties with Intel740 cards designed for the AGP slot. However, it later withdrew from this market and concentrated only on integrated graphics adapters. Thanks to this, it kept up with the support of new standards, hardware acceleration of video or outputs, and somehow supported 3D acceleration in games on the cheapest computers, compact PCs and notebooks, but it was always, not only for performance, but rather an emergency solution.
In the meantime, there have been a few reports that it is hiring and developing graphics chips for discrete cards, but the desktop and gaming graphics card segment has all but fizzled out. Only in recent years you could come across mentions of a DG1 graphics chip referred to as Iris Xe MAX and Xe DG1 graphics cards announced, or rather demonstrated sometime in 2020. But these only worked in small numbers more like developer cards, they never made it to the market. There were Gunnir graphics using the same chip in China, but there was nothing here, and the first products intended for general sale only came with the next generation of Intel chips.
It started with the weakest low-cost Arc A380 model last holiday. It can already be referred to as a regular graphics card, although it is not particularly interesting for gamers considering the performance somewhere on the level of the old GeForce GTX 1650 or the significantly trimmed Radeon RX 6400.
The first models for serious gaming were the Intel Arc A770 and A750 cards released a few months later. The A750 model exists in one version equipped with a DG2-512 chip in the ACM-G10 version, the more powerful Arc A770 models were created with 8 and 16 GB of memory. The parameters of the chip do not differ, however, the 8GB version is slightly slower due to the lower clocked memory.
Arc A750Arc A770 8 GBArc A770 16 GBMicroarchitectureXe HPGXe HPGXe HPGProduction processTSMC 6 nmTSMC 6 nmTSMC 6 nmCode designationACM-G10ACM-G10ACM-G10Number of transistors21.7 billion21.7 billion21.7 billionChip area406 mm²406 mm²X-Cores2 83232XMX Engines448512512X Vector Engines448512512Number of GPU shaders3 5844 0964 096Number of rasterization units112128128Number of texturing units224256256Ray tracing units283232Chip clock (average)2 050 MHz2 100 MHz2 100 MHzMemory 8 GB GDDR68 GB GDDR616 GB GDDR6Memory bus width256 b256 b256 bMemory speed16 Gb/s16 Gb/s17.5 Gb/s Memory throughput512 GB/s512 GB/s560 GB/sTotal card power (typical load)225 W225 W225 WSbusPCIe 4.0 ×16PCIe 4.0 ×16PCI e 4.0 ×16
We will look at a non-reference card from Acer. It offers factory overclocking, stably maintaining a clock speed of 2400 MHz, while Intel mentions a typical clock speed of 2100 MHz in the Arc A770 parameters. However, with the limited edition Arc A770 directly from Intel, the chip’s real operating clocks are only a few tens of megahertz below 2400 MHz.
This is what the card looked like in GPU-Z. Don’t pay attention to the driver versions, I already used the newer drivers 31.0.101.4311 in the performance tests, with which the card experienced a further increase in performance. Due to the introduction of new cards, the measured results unfortunately sat in a drawer for a while. But the performance has increased more in other games than I have in the testing methodology, the only game in the test suite that has seen a performance increase since then, according to the notes on newer versions of the drivers, is F1 22.
The packaging is simple – the card is in a black box made of corrugated cardboard, over which a sleeve with a description of the card is strung. As usual, we learn the most about the card on the back. On it, the manufacturer draws attention to the cooler using a combination of the fifth generation of the special AeroBlade 3D radial fan with blades made of thin sheet metal and the classic FrostBlade 2.0 axial fan, and to the company’s application for monitoring, controlling fan speeds and tuning the card’s power and consumption regulation. And further, it is rather a description of the features of the Arc A770 platform common to all graphics with this chip.
In the lower left corner, the requirements for Intel Core 10th generation and later platforms and AMD Ryzen 5000 or AMD Ryzen 3000 processors with AMD 500 and later chipsets are also mentioned. The reason is obvious, support for Resizeable BAR (or if you want SAM – Smart Access Memory). Without ReBAR, the performance of the card can be significantly lower, how much depends on the specific games.
I haven’t experimented with the card’s performance on older platforms, but it ran without problems at least on the Core i5-8600K used for noise measurements.
The brief installation manual in the accessories is not worth talking about, but what pleases me is the nice 32GB Adata UV350 flash drive, which has drivers from Intel and a control panel from Acer. Today, it is definitely more practical than DVD, and unlike it, you can still use it after installation.
You will probably download newer drivers directly from Intel’s website, the Acer panel should theoretically also be downloadable from the Microsoft Store, but in practice a search on the Store does not find the Predator BiFrost application. After installing from a flash drive, it was already possible to update to the latest version via the store,
You probably won’t find the app for the first time on Acer’s website either. You can also search for support, but they don’t use general terms like arc a770, but it works through product labeling.
Since Intel Arc drivers are largely unknown to the vast majority of people, we will take a closer look at the Intel control panel and the options offered by the PredatorBiFrost utility in the third chapter.
2023-07-21 20:34:16
#Acer #Predator #BiFrost #Intel #Arc #A770 #memory #thousand
