 Allow me to put on my shill hat for a moment. Everyone else is gonna tell you what's wrong with Intel's Arc A700 GPUs. And we're gonna need to talk about that too because it's a pretty sizable list. I mean, we've got the A770 losing to a card from almost 10 years ago in CSGO. How embarrassing. But what's this? It beats Nvidia's 3060 in Fortnite. It absolutely murders the Radeon 6600 in ray traced games and is available starting at just around its $289 MSRP, something I will never take for granted again. So it's with that in mind that I want to explore a different perspective. One where the benefits of competition may outweigh the risk of buying into a first generation product. That's right. It is time to get blue-pilled with me folks. Or not that one. I meant like Intel blue, though I am pretty excited right now. Excited to tell you about our sponsor, Ridge. Ridge wallet has redefined the traditional wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates because the bulge in your pants shouldn't be from your wallet. Use offer code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping.<|tr|><|translate|> Use offer code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. Intel's A750 and A770 GPUs are designed for gaming at either 1440p with medium details or 1080p Ultra. And they've got Nvidia's RTX 3060 directly in their crosshairs. Or at least now they do. Their transistor count and power consumption are both more comparable to the RTX 3070, which would indicate that Intel fell well short of their original performance targets and is now trying to make lemonade out of these lemons. But that's not our problem. And from a consumer standpoint, they kind of did. Because at $289, the A750 may just be the most silicon per dollar ever in a GPU. And there are situations where it really shows. Check out this performance in DirectX 12 games. 1080p high has Nvidia's 3060 taking nearly every game by a thin margin. But when the resolution gets cranked to 1440p at medium details, it's Intel racking up small wins nearly across the board. And this is against a card that costs 50 to $100 more. Even looking closer, the ARK cards continue to impress. Five and 1% lows are very comparable to the RTX 3060, which means you won't feel any extra hitching or stuttering in heavy firefights. And while I was concerned that ARK might fall flat on its face in a Ryzen system, that wasn't the case at all. Oh, and as an extra bonus, ARK murders the more price comparable RTX 3050. Isn't competition great? This is the point in the video where Intel's employees and shareholders might wanna stop watching. Cause we're about to look at some games that aren't DirectX 12 or Vulkan. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, ARK's performance falls to nearly half in DirectX 11. Ouch. And CS GO, a DirectX 9 title where ARK feels like a totally different card every time you start it up. With the A750 beating the A770 sometimes, 1440p results being higher than 1080p results. And oh, by the way, no matter which card you're looking at, they get absolutely wrecked in performance by the 3050, a flagship GPU from nine years ago, and probably a competitive abacus user. I mean, what happened to crush Intel's performance in these older titles? Well, in a nutshell, ARK isn't actually running DirectX 9 games in DirectX 9. Instead, they're using a DirectX 9 to DirectX 12 translation layer. This works because you can turn basically any DX 9 command into a string of DX 12 commands, which is great for compatibility, but in the process, you are adding a buttload of CPU overhead. So much that any small background task can significantly affect your frame rates. Now, because of the extremely limited time that we were given to benchmark ARK before the embargo lift, we weren't able to test a wide variety of older games. This is actually a strategy that we've seen often when a manufacturer doesn't want you to look too closely. Fortunately, we have a solution to that. Tomorrow, we are gonna be live for hours taking requests from our community and gaming side by side on the ARK A770 and RTX 3060 so you can see how your favorite games run, or if they run at all. Because nothing at this point is a guarantee. Intel told us point blank that they knew about the performance challenges of ARK in older games. And they had a strategy where they were gonna price this generation of cards according to how they would perform in a worst case scenario or in tier three games. And I'm not gonna go as far as to say that Intel lied, which would imply a premeditated intention to deceive. But what I do have to say is that these CSGO results show that they did not follow through on this. I mean, charitably, we could say that the ARK gets half of the performance of an RTX 3060. Though at 1080P, it's more like a third. So even if we're looking at a $400 RTX 3060, these A700 series GPUs should be at most 200 bucks. But if we go back to that die size conversation, I mean, remember, this is a GPU that is larger than a 3070 and built on TSMC's cutting edge and six node rather than in Intel's own fab. So they can't exactly give themselves a friends and neighbors discount on the fabbing. So if they went any lower, they'd likely be losing money on every card they sold. And it gets even worse. Unfortunately for Intel, who's trying to position themselves as the scrappy underdog, undercutting Nvidia's monopolistic pricing, we already have scrappy underdog at home. It's AMD and their Radeon 6600 goes for about 250 bucks and is able to truly trade blows with the RTX 3060 without the in specific DirectX 12 titles fine print. And although AMD software hasn't always been fantastic, if our community feedback is anything to go by, the last couple of years have been a real turning point and their RDNA 2 cards have aged like fine wine, getting better with each new driver update. I would hope that the same will happen for Arc and we actually have seen a lot of improvement since its first outing. Arc was actually impressively stable for a first gen product throughout our testing. But when it comes to raw performance, there are clearly some problems here that can't be fixed without new silicon. Like Intel's reliance on resizable bar. Rebar, as we've started calling it, is a feature that allows for much larger, more efficient data dumps between the GPU and the system memory. It's only available on systems from the last few years, but for most people, that's not really a huge deal because performance on AMD and Nvidia cards only improves by anywhere from one to at most about 10%. For Intel on the other hand, rebar is basically a necessity. Performance can end up so bad without it that Intel said in their own press briefing that if you don't have it, you might as well get a 3060. With this in mind then, we point blank asked Intel, why the heck would anybody buy an Arc GPU over the RX 6600? To which they replied that the RX 6600 doesn't have feature parity with the A750. When compared to Radeon 6000, Intel claimed, Arc has much better ray tracing, AI acceleration, and media encoders that make it a much closer competitor to the RTX 3060 and okay, yeah, if you care about those things, they actually have a pretty good point. In ray tracing titles, the A770 is a tiny bit behind the RTX 3060 and in shadow of the Tomb Raider, Intel's Xe Super Sampling or XCSS ended up performing very similarly to Nvidia's DLSS2. So yes, Intel, you do very much have a leg up on AMD in 100% of the strand type games on the market, along with the other 20 games that actually support XCSS. But it's clear you'll need to pull some tricks out of your sleeves to get game developers to adopt XCSS more broadly. That sleeve trick, by the way, is easy on our short circuit hoodie, lttstore.com. It's not just game super sampling either. If you care about AI performance more generally, ARK is kind of excellent and here's why. Traditionally, matrix operations are done using a Mac or a multiply accumulate combine, which is okay at traditional workloads, but can be pretty slow for AI. On integrated graphics, Intel has a fancier way to math called DP4A, where it takes a 32-bit register and splits it into eight-bit chunks, allowing for four parallel operations to be performed at once, improving throughput by about four times. The full fat ARK cards, like the A750, take that to the next level with XMX, which allows you to do multiple multiply accumulates in parallel, which can improve throughput by up to 16 times, in theory. And in practice, where the A770 absolutely slaughtered the competition in Topaz Video Enhanced AI without running into any of the issues that we experienced in our A370M review. Intel ARK also supports next-gen AV1 encoding and decoding, which is particularly beneficial for streamers due to its much higher image quality at low bit rates compared to H.264. We actually have a video coming up that discusses using a low-end ARK GPU as kind of an encoding co-processor if you don't wanna spend $900 on an RTX 40, excuse me, sorry, I mean, 4080, 12 gig. Unfortunately, in more traditional H.264 and H.265 encoding, the RTX 3060 is able to handily embarrass even the top tier A770, and the same goes for Blender rendering. Though, as a consolation prize, Intel was at least able to beat the 3050 in Blender, while AMD continued to make its usual excellent case for never using AMD if you're a Blender artist. Intel also made a good case for not using ARK on Linux for the foreseeable future. Sorry, guys, I know that you had high hopes, but currently, ARK only supports kernel version six, and Intel has said that they do not plan on supporting version five, meaning that every stable version of Linux is currently not supported. To put this in perspective for the non-Linux folks out there, this is basically like Intel launching a product, but only having drivers for Windows 12. Oh, one thing I haven't mentioned yet is that there are both 16-gig and 8-gig versions of the A770, but the reason I didn't mention that is that Intel's only doing a small run of 16-gig cards, and the A750 is the far more compelling option anyway at $289 for nearly the same performance. Now, thank you for that. I'm going to do something that might surprise you. I'm gonna ask you, you fine viewer of Linus Tech Tips, you savvy source of tech support for your friends and family, to seriously consider Arc for your next GPU, because somebody needs to do it, and it can't be your friend who's shopping for pre-builds right now. You do not wanna help them troubleshoot random edge cases on this thing, but somebody has to do it, because the last few years have made it clear that Nvidia has no qualms about gouging their customers when there's a shortage or no shortage, and the thing is that everyone says they want more competition, but then they go ahead and just buy the Nvidia GPU and, hey, thanks AMD for keeping Team Green honest. Glad you exist, except when you don't keep Team Green honest, because you also like to jack up your prices and sell to crypto miners. So there it is. If you're the technical type, and don't mind rolling the dice once in a while, I'm asking you to give Intel Arc a shot. You might not get as many FPS, but I think it's safe to say you'll have a more interesting hardware experience than a 3060 owner will. You can even overclock the thing, or you could just ignore my plea and wait for AMD's RDNA 3 to drop, so you can pick up a GPU that was designed to take on Nvidia's 4000 series, instead of one that failed to take on the 3070. Just like I failed to segue to our sponsor, Nexigo. If you're working from home and are in need of a new webcam, Nexigo has a wide variety to choose from to keep you looking sharp on your conference calls. Whether you're on a budget and need high quality video, or you just want the best possible webcam regardless of the price, their selection of webcams and webcam accessories will help you look and sound your best. Even if you're looking for something more in the middle, Nexigo has you covered. So take your webcam setup to the next level and get a Nexigo webcam using the link down below. If you guys enjoyed this video, you're gonna wanna check out our unboxing of the A770 over on the ShortCircuit channel. We get into a little bit more depth about the different kinds of connectors on it and all that kind of good stuff. So the RGB lighting up.