Intel is setting expectations low for its Arc GPUs

Intel’s tempering expectations for its upcoming Arc A750 Limited Edition GPU. In a new video that’s just three minutes long, the chipmaker gives us the briefest of glimpses at the card’s pretty average on-paper performance.

Before we dive in, it’s important to note that the A750 is supposed to be one of Intel’s top-of-the-line GPUs, as indicated by the “7” at the front of its name. Intel’s naming conventions have the Arc 5 and Arc 3 sitting below the Arc 7, which are supposed to offer midrange and entry-level performance, respectively.

During the video, Intel’s Ryan Shrout boots up Cyberpunk 2077 on a PC with the A750 chip installed, and instead of giving us a long look at gameplay, Shrout skips straight to performance. With the game set to the “high-quality” preset and 2560 x 1440 resolution, Shrout says the card gets “just under” 60 frames per second (FPS) on average, which isn’t bad, but not necessarily what you’d expect from a company like Intel’s debut into discrete graphics cards.

Shrout shows off benchmark tests next, revealing how well the card fares against the entry-level Nividia GeForce RTX 3060. The Intel Arc A750 performs 1.06 to 1.15 times better than the standard RTX 3060 on games like Cyberpunk 2077, F1 2021, Control, Borderlands 3, and Fortnite. But these benchmark tests come with an asterisk — Shrout points out that “the performance of Arc won’t look like this in all games,” and describes the test as “a great view of what Arc is capable of with the right game enablement and software engineering.” (Not to mention that these tests weren’t performed by an independent party.)

Obviously, it’s impossible to tell how a card really performs until we try it out for ourselves, but this first look offered by Intel isn’t exactly mind-blowing. Intel’s Arc A750 GPU is set to launch later this summer, but Intel has already released its A370M and A350M mobile GPUs in a few different notebooks, as well as the entry-level Arc A380 desktop GPU in China (which is supposed to hit the global market later this year).

So far, things aren’t looking all that great for Intel’s new line of GPUs. A review by Linus Tech Tips says the addition of Intel’s A370M actually made the 16-inch HP Spectre x360 laptop “worse” than the previous RTX 3050 model, while PC gaming YouTube channel Gamer Nexus reported inconsistent performance with the A380. Bugs and other glitches are inevitable in any new product, and as Linus points out in his video, users may be less inclined to buy something that requires diving into unchartered territories, especially with GPUs becoming so readily available and Nvidia’s 40-series cards right around the corner.