Enter Intel XeSS. When set to "Balanced", XeSS turns out to be a game changer for the A770, getting it an average framerate of 66 fps (with an average minimum of 46 fps) at 1080p, an average of 51 fps (with an average minimum of 38 fps) at 1440p, and an average 33 fps (average minimum 26 fps) at 4K with ray tracing maxed out. Xe HPG microarchitecture is engineered from the ground-up to deliver high performance, efficiency, and scalability for gamers and creators. Intel Xe Super Sampling technology (XeSS) takes your gaming experience to the next level with AI-enhanced upscaling enabling more performance with high image fidelity. XeSS is optimized for Intel® Arc™ graphics products with the ability to take advantage of XMX AI hardware acceleration.

All told, then, the Intel Arc A770 turns out to be a surprisingly good graphics card for modern gaming titles that can sometimes even hold its own against the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti. It can't hold a candle to the RX 7700 XT or RTX 4070, but it was never meant to, and given that those cards cost substantially more than the Arc A770, this is entirely expected.But those decisions are not as cut and dry as you might think, and Intel's Arc A770 holds up very well against modern midrange offerings, despite really being a last-gen card. And, currently, the 16GB variant is the only 1440p card that you're going to find at this price, even among Nvidia and AMD's last-gen offerings like the RTX 3060 Ti and AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT. So for 1440p gamers on a very tight budget, this card fills a very vital niche, and it's really the only card that does so. While this card has very solid specs, including 16GB VRAM and a 256-bit memory bus, its hardware is effectively last-gen. Though the synthetic test scores could show untapped potential in the graphics card that we aren’t currently seeing, for one reason or another, we can’t be sure we will ever see it perform specifically in gaming similar to how it did in these synthetic tests. We can be certain it won’t match its prowess in Furmark in games, as that would actually make it faster than our Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition! Overall, the software is cleanly laid out and provides a good amount of information, including the card's active power draw and usage specs. As far as features all this hardware empowers, there's a lot to like here. The matrix cores are leveraged to great effect by Intel's XeSS graphics upscaling tech found in a growing number of games, and this hardware advantage generally outperforms AMD's FSR 2.0, which is strictly a software-based upscaler.

It’s also important to note that Intel’s Arc GPUs will be arriving late. The company originally planned on formally launching them in the US in Q3, following an earlier delay. However, the Oct. 12 launch date shows the Arc A770 will actually land in Q4. The introduction of new types of display-sync technology is another trend that has been popular in recent years. The company here has introduced three types of sync for its customers to use to adjust their gaming experience. The first, Adaptive Sync, is nothing new; it essentially works like V-Sync. The second, Speed Sync, aims to rush frames out to the monitor faster to avoid image tearing. The last, Smooth Sync, uses a dithering filter to try and mask screen tearing. Right out the gate, I'll say that if you are looking for one of the best cheap graphics cards for 1440p gaming, this card definitely needs to be on your list. It offers great 1440p performance for most modern PC titles that most of us are going to be playing and it's priced very competitively against its rivals. RGB Lighting: Customize RGB lighting colors and effects and bring your Predator BiFrost Intel Arc A770 OC graphics card to life That's something the RTX 4060 Ti can't manage thanks to its smaller frame buffer (8GB VRAM), and while the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti could theoretically perform better (I have not tested the 16GB so I cannot say for certain), it still has half the memory bus width of the A770, leading to a much lower bandwidth for larger texture files to pass through.Intel’s Arc A770 Limited Edition graphics card clearly has a few rough areas that need to be smoothed over. Based on our limited tests with legacy titles, its performance in older games is not competitive in its price range; its idle power draw is too high; and its overall performance can vary a great deal from one game to the next. Intel is also pushing its XeSS technology, which utilizes AI hardware inside of the GPU to boost performance. This technology is similar to AMD’s FSR and Nvidia’s DLSS, and it’s used in much the same way in games. There are options to use XeSS to prioritize performance to get the most frames per second, while maintaining the best possible image quality. We were able to test this in just one title, Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, and we opted for the Balanced option there. You can see the test results in the charts coming up below. In synthetic benchmarks, the A770 performed fairly well against the current crop of graphics cards, despite its effectively being a last-gen card. It is particularly strong competition against the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti across multiple workloads, and it even beats the 4060 Ti in a couple of tests. Despite that, it still manages to be a fantastic value on the market right now given its low MSRP and fairly solid performance, rivaling the RTX 4060 Ti on the numbers. In reality though, with this card selling for significantly less than its MSRP, it is inarguably the best value among midrange cards right now, and it's not even close.

Unleash your imagination and captivate audiences with rich digital content creation using a hyper advanced media engine, augmented by AI and accelerated by Intel® Deep Link technology. Create compelling content, powered by the first graphics card with support for all current leading media formats, and keep yourself up to date with the most advanced AV1 video encode capabilities.The RTX 4060 Ti outperforms the Intel Arc A770 at just about every turn, only faltering when it comes to 4K performance, due to its more restricted VRAM pool and memory bus. If you don't care about 4K, then this is the card you want (assuming the much higher price isn't an issue).