Intel cuts Arc A750 GPU’s price while boasting about driver optimizations

it has been about 4 months Since the launch of Intel The long-awaited Arc graphics cardTo roll the dice and buy a flagship A770 or A750 and get a decent deal on a mid-range GPU after two years of artificially inflated prices, here’s the news. In many cases good.was there Some weird issues here and therebut Intel continues to plug in buggy drivers, slowly improving Arc’s performance in various games.

The company is making two announcements today. First, the Arc A750 (his third fastest Arc card after the 16GB and 8GB versions of the A770) has seen a price drop from $289 to $249. Second, the company has released yet another driver update (version 31.0.101.4086) with a wide range of performance improvements for older DirectX 9 games and more targeted launches for newer titles compared to his driver at the October launch. It boasts focused improvements.

In our review, the Arc A750 was typically around 10-20 percent slower than the A770’s 16GB version, at least in games where the A750’s 8GB of memory wasn’t a bottleneck. But in games where it did well, it’s usually outperformed Nvidia’s RTX 3060, and Intel’s driver updates have made the list of “games Arc often plays” a bit longer. , typically available in the $350 to $400 range.

Driver improvements are mostly old news for Arc owners who install new updates as they are released.In particular, many of the DirectX 9 improvements were previewed In December beta driver updateIntel seems to use both DirectX 12 and Vulkan to DirectX 9 conversion layers, choosing different layers to optimize speed for certain games.

Expanding / frame time CS:GO It also suggests that DirectX 9 optimizations will make the game run smoother with fewer visible hitches.

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Intel says that on average these older games run 43% faster than with the boot drivers. Gameplay is also overall smoother and less hitching thanks to faster frame times and consistency.

According to Intel, the improvements in the new DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games were small and not very popular.just hard to say how Intel’s charts are much faster on average, as they occasionally turn into hard-to-analyze measurements like “average FPS per dollar.” However, the company does not support large-scale multiplayer games (fortnite, Valorant, DOTA 2, league of legends) and major releases (Assassin’s Creed, red dead redemption 2, Cyberpunk 2077) means that most people have played at least a few games that have benefited from Intel’s driver work.

In the months leading up to Arc’s launch, Intel went on a sort of pre-emptive apology tour, stating that while Arc’s performance on new DirectX 12 and Vulkan games is great, its performance on DirectX 11 and older games is poor. I’ve explained many times that performance succeeds or fails.

Not the best footing for Intel to start with, especially since Arc also showed up late to the party – it was designed to compete with the Nvidia RTX 3000 series and AMD RX 6000 series, both of which have already been replaced. Intel also missed a launch opportunity while the 2021 and 2022 GPU shortage was still in full swing. But the description has the benefit of setting expectations, and most reviews for the GPU were at least marginally positive where they could be relentlessly negative.

I don’t know if that effort translated into sales, but most signs point to a slow start. Arc has yet to impact Steam hardware survey data As of December 2022, still grouped under “Other”. Using customer reviews as a proxy for popularity, Arc A770 and A750 GPUsTogether, there are a total of 142 reviews on Newegg, List of RTX 3060 GPUs Collectively we have many times that amount.