Intel Arc A750 Limited Edition

With its multipronged 2022 Arc launch, Intel has put on a full-court press to crack the graphics card market. The forwards are its budget Arc A380 ($139.99), and the more powerful, though still moderately priced, Arc A770 ($329 for the 8GB card; $349 for 16GB). Its third player on the field—the $289 Arc A750 Limited Edition—comes up for test today, a few weeks after its initial launch.

The A750 falls close to the A770 in most aspects, and in some ways is the best of the bunch, as pure hardware. The problem, though, remains the state of Intel’s graphics drivers, which are still in the early first quarter of the game. Performance in our tests has proven hit-or-miss, with a smattering of airballs. That, unfortunately, leaves the Arc A750 in the same position as Intel’s other graphics cards: full of potential, but difficult to recommend at the moment unless you're willing to be patient and grow with it, rooting for Team Arc to get competitive.

The Design: Blink and You'll See an A770

Intel’s Arc A750 employs a nearly identical design to the company’s Arc A770 graphics card, both physically and in terms of hardware resources. Both the Intel Arc A750 Limited Edition and the Arc A770 Limited Edition look the same at a glance, and indeed the thermal solution is no different. This consists of a dual-fan cooler over a series of heatpipes and an aluminum heatsink, stiffened by a clean-looking backplate identifying the card. A ring of RGB LEDs runs around the card edge. The only thing that differentiates the two, from the outside, is the model number on the back.

The A750 and A770 are built on the same GPU die, as well, It measures 406mm2 and is produced on TSMC’s N6 6nm manufacturing process. The difference: The Arc A750’s GPU is partially disabled and doesn’t have quite as much raw power as the one in the Arc A770. But it’s not far off. Where the Arc A770 has 512 Vector Engines, 256 TMUs, and 128 ROPs, the A750 has 448 Vector Engines, 224 TMUs, and 112 ROPs.

Intel also set these GPUs with nearly identical clock speeds. The Arc A750 runs at 2,050MHz against the A770’s 2,100MHz, a trivial difference.

The key difference between the two cards is actually in the video memory department, which was scaled back from 16GB on the top-end Arc A770 to just 8GB on the A750. (Intel also offers a cheaper 8GB version of the A770.)

Memory is connected to the GPU on both cards via a 256-bit memory interface, but Intel opted for slightly faster VRAM on the Arc A770. This gives the Arc A770 peak theoretical bandwidth of 560GBps, while the Arc A770 is capped slightly lower, at 512GBps.

The card has the typical one-HDMI, three-DisplayPort output layout of most modern twin-slot-width cards. Overall, if you discount the memory, the differences between the Arc A750 and the A770 are minute. That hardware parallelism results in the two cards placing very close together, in terms of performance, in most situations, as you will soon see.

If you think of this situation using Nvidia’s typical GPU nomenclature, the Arc A750 is akin to a non-"Ti" card—where Nvidia's "Ti" moniker indicates some smaller upgrade or upgrades made to existing products—with the Arc A770 being the Ti variant.

Testing the Intel Arc A750: Same Size, Lesser Performance

The Arc A750 Limited Edition was tested on our 2022 GPU test bed. It features an Intel Core i9-12900K processor installed into an Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero motherboard. To maximize performance, the system uses 32GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM clocked at 5,600MHz and operating in a dual-channel configuration.

The processor is cooled by a Corsair Hydro Series H100X liquid cooler. A 1TB Corsair MP600 Pro NVMe 4.0 SSD is used in this system as the primary storage device, and a Corsair HX1500i 1,500-watt 80 Plus Platinum power supply drives the full rig. All tests are performed under Windows 11 Pro with all of the latest system updates.

Synthetic Tests

Synthetic tests remain a strong point for Intel’s new Arc Alchemist graphics cards. In most of the synthetic tests, the Arc A750 performs second-best only to the Arc A770. It was overshadowed in Superposition’s 4K Optimized DirectX test by the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT, but it nonetheless performed well here compared to most other cards.

These test results aren’t truly reflections of real-world performance, but they give an idea of what the graphics hardware might be capable of under the right, optimized conditions. As you’ll see, synthetics really are the Arc A750’s strong point, while games are another story—and arguably the only story that matters for this class of card.

FSR/DLSS Games Testing

In the game F1 22, the Arc A750 also turns in strong test results. It ever-so-slightly outperforms the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT and performs nearly the same as the Arc A770. It isn't quite up to matching the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 with DLSS/FSR disabled, but things improve when this feature is turned on, enabling the Arc A750 to surpass the RTX 3060 and the Arc A770. We should also point out, though, that enabling FSR helps the Radeon RX 6600 XT even more, though that class of GPU (largely in the mid-$300s) is costlier than the A750.

For some reason, FSR currently isn’t working with Intel graphics cards in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, so we only have test results for this game with DLSS/FSR disabled. Here is where the A750 stumbles and we see the first big speed stumble with Intel and its graphics cards, as the Arc A750 performs quite poorly in this test. We chalk this up to driver issues, currently the bane of Arc's existence. Indeed, outside the benchmark, the game’s menu proved almost unnavigable, and playing the game is absolutely out of the question with such poor performance.

AAA Game Tests (Modern)

These driver issues are anything but consistent, as you'll see in our other game tests. Red Dead Redemption 2, which we typically use as a top-line AAA game to test graphics cards, completely refuses to start with the Arc A750—the game as a whole, not just the benchmark. It's been left off our usual chart below. This fail was surprising, as the game ran just fine on Intel’s Arc A770 and Arc A380 graphics cards when we tested them earlier in the year.

Performance in the games that did run is overall decent. As to be expected, the Arc A750 is consistently slower than the Arc A770, but by only a relatively small margin. Things are a bit more mixed compared to the Radeon RX 6600 XT, as the Arc A750, at 1080p, is significantly slower than that card in these three tests. At 4K, though, the Arc A750 is a little faster in Total War: Three Kingdoms and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. This is roughly the same situation when comparing the Arc A750 to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060. So the potential is there.

AAA Game Tests (Legacy)

The results on our standard legacy game tests are, in general, subpar on the Intel Arc A750. We've uncovered a remix of the same song on all of Intel’s graphics cards so far. One of our three usual games, Sleeping Dogs, has been left off the chart below for a failure by the A750 to run the benchmark. It was simply outclassed at 1080p, the resolution at which you'd most likely run a card of this price class.

We haven't mentioned another known issue of Intel’s Arc Alchemist graphics cards, but this is the right place for it: Its performance with older graphics APIs is spotty, at best. That’s putting it kindly, as the chart above shows. This makes the Arc A750 and any of Intel’s Arc Alchemist graphics cards poor options if your gaming is dominated by older titles that were built with DirectX 11 or an older API.

Power Consumption

We test the full power consumption of the system while testing graphics cards using a Kill-A-Watt power meter. As these results show, this is another troublesome area for Intel Arc, at the moment.

Idle power consumption is higher than it should be, as the GPU never quite reaches a fully idle state and its usage remains north of 10% even when sitting at the desktop. This, yet again, is a sign of driver issues. Power consumption in FurMark, however, is on the upper end of things and above most of the competition. Typically we see higher power consumption when running Guardians of the Galaxy, but in this case we only saw it top out close to the same numbers we saw from FurMark. Likely, this is due to the card not performing correctly while running the game, rather than the card actually having lower power consumption at full load.

Verdict: Drivers Are Driving Arc Down

Intel’s Arc A750 looks, in person and on paper, like it is so close to being something great, and ready to soar. But, tragically, it pulls an Icarus once we fire up our tests. The card’s premium build quality, solid specs, and generally competitive MSRP might make for a winning combination. But this can only happen with drivers capable of supporting the card and extracting better and more consistent performance from the hardware.

At this time, the drivers just aren't at that state. As a result, we can't recommend the Arc A750 except, perhaps, to big-time tech enthusiasts who might get a kick out of running a graphics card that isn’t from Team Red or Team Green. And never mind the money: They'll also have to be well-funded with a stock of patience to watch the card's prospects grow, like the green shoots of a plant.

If Arc hopes to make a major impact on the graphics card market, these better drivers need to come soon. Nvidia's rolling out its GeForce RTX 4000 series piece by piece, and while the first two cards are vastly pricier than the initial Arcs, cheaper ones are likely coming soon. AMD, too, has begun in its rollout of the new RX 7000 series Radeons, like Nvidia starting at the top and eventually working its way down.

Of greater immediate concern, though? Prices on competing cards, such as the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, are falling and eating away at one of the Arc A750’s most attractive qualities: its competitive price point. It's still very early in the game for Arc, but the clock is ticking.