BLUE DAWN

INTEL graphics cards have become a genuine contender. How, and why?

- Phil Iwaniuk

We all love a plucky underdog story, and Intel's entry to the discrete graphics card market felt like just that in 2022. Strange as it sound to describe a semiconductor W behemoth with a $140bn market cap as the Mighty Ducks to Nvidia's Hawks, it does make sense when you consider that Jensen Huang's outfit has a $1.13 trillion market cap.

Besides, the graphics war hadn't been Intel's fight until the release of the Arc A750 and A770 cards. Not really. Intel's on-die graphics served a small proportion of the gaming community, but it was Nvidia and AMD who were really down in the trenches, exchanging salvos of benchmarks. It was a fight that had been waged for two decades, too. What chance did Intel have of catching up?

And yet here we are in 2023 looking at two viable budget GPUs from Team Blue. Its Arc cards make smart use of resizable BAR, a PCle protocol that makes it easier for CPU and GPU to share resources. Introduced in Nvidia's RTX 3000 series, it's also part of the ARC cards' spec sheet. The catch is that you need a reasonably new CPU to make use of the feature, but make use of it the Arc certainly does. Depending on the game, resolution and overall graphics setting, turning reBAR on might yield you anything from 5-15 extra FPS.

THE A-TEAM

They're very adept ray tracing cards, too. While AMD's RX 6600 and 6600 XT struggle to give the RTX 3060 TI much of a fight, the Arc A770 in particular shows surprisingly good RT performance at the price point.