Team Blue has a lot to prove muscling in on territory previously only occupied by its rivals in Nvidia and AMD. Enter the Intel Arc A770, the flagship of the company’s Alchemist lineup. It offers a ton of value for money with its price-to-performance ratio especially in 2024 after a series of price drops and driver fixes. While it may have been a harder sell at release, for the most part, the wrinkles have been ironed and this option can be considered one of the best GPUs for its class. Let’s get into why in this full Intel Arc A770 review.
Intel Arc A770 Price
The Intel Arc A770 originally launched with an MSRP of $329 which positions it as one of the cheapest graphics cards on the market today. With that said, you can pick it up cheaper in several different configurations, further adding to its aggressive pricing given its specs, which we’ll touch upon further down the page. Our review unit is the Acer Predator BiFrost Intel Arc A770 OC model which is among the most expensive of the lineup at $379 with RGB lighting and some enhancements.
However, you can find the GPU as cheap as $280 for versions such as the ASRock Challenger Arc A770 and mid-range offerings like the Sparkle Intel Arc A770 Titan OC for $310. That effectively puts Intel’s flagship video card in league with the likes of the RX 7600 XT and the RTX 4060, firmly in the mainstream camp as far as the power spectrum goes. Far from a powerhouse, but it’s great to see a GPU manufacturer catering to the cash-strapped PC gamers who don’t want bleeding-edge performance.
- GPU: DG2-512
- GPU cores: 4,096
- VRAM: 16GB GDDR6
- Memory bus width: 256-bit
- Base clock speed: 2100 MHz
- Boost clock speed: 2400 MHz
- Bandwidth: 512.0 GB/sec
While the Intel Arc A770 is far from a powerhouse graphics card, it offers excellent performance in 1080p with strong figures in 1440p, too. You’ll need a fairly modern CPU to enable Resizable BAR for the best performance potential, though, which could impact those running older processors.
- Excels in 1080p
- Aggressive pricing
- 16GB GDDR6 VRAM
- ReBAR is essential
- Outperformed by RTX 4060 Ti
Intel Arc A770 key specs
The Intel Arc A770 is built upon the GD2-512 die with a total of 4,096 GPU cores, 256 TMus, 128 ROPs, and 16GB GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit memory bus. As a graphics card primarily geared at 1080p and 1440p, these specs should be more than enough to push today’s games in these two target resolutions, whether natively or through utilizing the company’s Xe cores for XeSS AI upscaling. There are also a total of 32 RT cores, so while it won’t be a ray tracing powerhouse, it’s certainly possible.
What’s impressive out of the box is the base clock speed of 2,100 MHz which is faster than many entry-level GPUs on the market, further bolstered by a leading boost clock of 2,400 MHz. There is 16 Gbps effective memory with a bandwidth of 512 GB/sec, substantially higher than the mainstream options from AMD and Nvidia, owing in part to a larger memory bus. This extends to the power consumption which is fairly minimal at 225W TDP; not bad.
Intel Arc A770 key design
Close-up of a modern Intel Arc A770 graphics card with distinctive branding logo.
Close-up of an Intel Arc A770 graphics card cooling fan with the label ‘aeroblade 3d fan’.
Rear I/O of the Arc A770
The fans of the Arc A770
The heatsink of the Arc A770
As expected given its fairly humble hardware, the Intel Arc A770 keeps things as compact and concise as it can. It’s a dual-slot GPU requiring a 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connector with a single HDMI 2.1 port and 3x DisplayPort 2.0 ports. Our review unit, the Acer Predator BiFrost Intel Arc A770 OC features an unconventional dual fan setup, one of which has RGB which is rarely seen on a lower-end partner card, and to do so, this variant requires a total of 2x 8-pin power connectors which is a little odd.
The Intel Arc A770 performs well enough but is outdone by both the RX 7600 XT and the RTX 4060 Ti in Cyberpunk 2077 in 1080p
Whether the extra flashiness is worth the $50 premium or not remains up to you, but for our money, this is a fine-looking video card that stands out above its competitors. It’s just a shame that so few of Intel’s partners actually developed variants for this GPU, meaning your options are still quite limited in 2024. Then we get to the fact that you’ll need to enable ReBar (Resizable BAR) for the best performance out of the video card, which means having a 10th Gen Intel Core CPU or a 3rd Gen Ryzen CPU. If you’re running an older chip, you may need to look for an alternative from AMD or Nvidia instead.
Intel Arc A770 performance
With all said, the Intel Arc A770 performs well enough but is outdone by both the RX 7600 XT and the RTX 4060 Ti in Cyberpunk 2077 in 1080p by a considerable margin. The gap is closed somewhat with more than playable figures in 1440p with CD Projekt Red’s RPG shooter falling just behind the 60fps mark on all counts. As for 4K, this card just can’t do it to a playable standard which shouldn’t be all too shocking given the hardware.
Ray tracing is also a little disappointing. The Arc A770 achieves about 30fps with the game maxed out in 1080p which while far from poor, is just about playable. While Intel’s GPU outdoes the RX 7600 XT in this respect, it still lags behind Nvidia’s mainstream offering, not quite singing either. This could change when enabling XeSS, but we stuck to native rasterization for the testing conducted by BGFG’s Sebastian Kozlowski.
| Cyberpunk 2077 | Arc A770 | RX 7600 XT | RTX 4060 Ti |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1080p | 77 | 86 | 86 |
| 1440p | 54 | 53 | 51 |
| 4K | 27 | 22 | 21 |
| 1080p RT | 31 | 24 | 38 |
| 1440p RT | 20 | 14 | 25 |
Similar can be said for 3DMark where the A770 holds its own against the RX 7600 XT but gets trounced by the RTX 4060 Ti, even though the latter has half the available memory pool. It’s not a bad showing at all but goes to show the differences in architecture between the three GPU generations and their effectiveness, as the results below show.
| 3D Mark | Arc A770 | RX 7600 XT | RTX 4060 Ti |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fire Strike Ultra | 7,128 | 7,465 | 14,518 |
| Time Spy Extreme | 6,666 | 5,371 | 11,887 |
| Port Royal (RT) | 14,518 | 11,887 | 15,552 |
Conclusion
Since its launch, the Intel Arc A770 has been something of an outlier in the GPU market. While it’s hard to stomach at its MSRP, factoring the price drop in, it becomes a far more viable video card. It’s equipped and ready for DirectX 12 and ray tracing armed with DLSS-style XeSS AI upscaling for higher frames in games. The simple fact of the matter is Intel’s Arc GPUs and Intel’s XeSS as a whole are less proven than what AMD and Nvidia offer in 2024, making this value play a bit more of a gamble.
There is a lot that’s worth praising, such as the low power draw and the frame rates taken as a whole when compared to the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti. There are ray-tracing units and a solid memory bandwidth with the 16GB GDDR6 memory pool. Arc Alchemist feels like a testing ground for Arc cards, and likely we’ll only see sweeping improvements should Battlemage deliver across the board. Instead of being a direct rival in the mid-range, it instead goes cheaper but offers less.
Provided your CPU and motherboard are fairly recent, you shouldn’t have much in the way to worry about with compatibility, only really through drivers that are hit-and-miss. In 2024, more games are supporting Intel’s GPUs and XeSS as developers become more familiar with the Xe-HPG architecture and the Xe Vector engines for performance gains and performance uplift. Arc has come a long way since it was first unveiled, but there’s still a fair distance to go before it achieves greatness.
Check your CPU’s compatibility
Resizable BAR is a function you’re able to do with Intel Core 10th Gen / AMD Ryzen 3rd Gen and up. If you’re running an older processor then it might be time for an upgrade.
Is the Intel Arc A770 worth it?
Overall, the Intel Arc A770 is a strong performer given its price point but it doesn’t quite excel as well as the similarly priced RTX 4060 Ti does, despite largely having a lead over AMD’s more recent RX 7600 XT. If you have a CPU that you’re able to enable Resizable BAR on and want a good amount of VRAM for an all-star price then it ticks the right boxes, even if it’s unlikely to blow you away to the same extent as some slightly pricier offerings.
