Summary
- Intel seems focused on capturing the value buyer, carving out a niche for itself in the budget and mid-range segment.
- It has significantly improved performance with driver updates, and value-for-money with price cuts.
- In 2024, Intel needs to avoid mistakes with communication, availability, and pricing to consolidate the progress it made in this generation.
Around a year ago, Intel put its foot forward in the discrete GPU market with its most powerful Alchemist GPUs — the Arc A750 and Arc A770. Much more powerful than the entry-level Arc A380 released months prior, these mid-range cards sought to offer more competition in the Nvidia-AMD duopoly. And, despite some initial hiccups, Intel managed to do exactly that in the mid-range segment, becoming a strong contender for one of the best GPUs if you're on a budget.
Primarily competing with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, Intel's Arc A770 is Team Blue's most powerful offering yet. And, around a year after its launch, many of its initial performance and compatibility issues have been fixed, resulting in an even better value proposition. But, improvements notwithstanding, has Intel done enough to warrant your attention in late 2023 and even in 2024? As a budget or mid-range buyer, should you consider an Intel Arc GPU? Let's find out.
Intel's rightly focused on the value buyer
Budget and mid-range might just be saved
While Nvidia is busy producing the next luxury GPU, and AMD attempts to price its cards as high as they reasonably can, Intel might just beat the competition in capturing the value buyer. Even before Intel launched its Alchemist cards, everyone expected the company to start by targeting the budget GPU market. And as reasonable as that is, Intel seems to be razor-focused on the budget and mid-range segments alone.
Intel could realistically beat AMD to the punch by launching its next-gen Battlemage cards in the first half of 2024.
This could be a great move as Nvidia continues to corner the high-end market, leveraging its years of domination. Even AMD is rumored to abandon the top-end performance tier next generation and focus solely on the mid-range. But Intel could realistically beat AMD to the punch by launching its next-gen Battlemage cards in the first half of 2024.
Consider the Arc A770 selling for around $300 in the current market — priced similarly to the RTX 3060 12GB but featuring 16GB VRAM, superior AV1 encoding, and 10% more performance than the RTX 3060. Even in raytraced scenarios, the Arc A770 performs on par with the RTX 3060. Ray tracing shouldn't be considered in this performance class, but Intel offering similar performance to Nvidia at the same price is still commendable.
Intel Arc is maturing quickly
Significant gains from driver updates
At launch, despite offering competitive performance, the Intel Arc GPUs faced a lot of issues — poor support for DX9 games, higher power consumption, and higher-than-ideal pricing. But gradually, many of these issues have all but disappeared. Intel has churned out over a dozen driver updates over the past year, improving performance across DX9, DX11, and DX12 games. This shows the company's continued dedication to its discrete GPU vertical.
Even the prices of the Arc A770 and Arc A750 have come down a lot when compared to launch pricing. If Intel improves the value-for-money further with its Batlemage cards and manages to comfortably beat mid-range offerings from both Nvidia and AMD, it could firmly carve out a niche for itself. But AMD's FSR enjoys greater support than Intel's XeSS, plus there are a handful of AMD cards offering better value-for-money than those from Intel.
It needs to work on better industry support for XeSS and improved availability.
With continued support, however, Intel could realistically offer performance on par or even better than AMD. It needs to work on better industry support for XeSS and improved availability so value buyers can genuinely consider its offerings over the competition.
Intel can't afford mistakes next generation
2024 will be crucial for Team Blue
Even though Intel has managed to level things with Nvidia's mid-range offerings at the same price, it isn't enough to turn things around. Nvidia's mindshare and legacy support for older games is too strong. Moreover, AMD has far too many budget and mid-range SKUs to last well into the next year, even if its RX 8000 GPUs don't come out till early 2025. So, Intel has its path cut out for it.
Resizable BAR being mandatory to maximize Intel Arc performance was easily overlooked by many.
Compared to the Alchemist GPUs, Intel can't afford poor communication and availability to hurt its plans next generation. Things like Resizable BAR being mandatory to maximize Intel Arc performance were easily overlooked by many. If Intel wants to consolidate the progress achieved this generation, stuff like this cannot be repeated.
Plus, Intel needs to release its next-gen cards with the perfect pricing at launch itself, not wait to cut prices later. The commitment to target the value segment needs to be communicated perfectly to gamers as well as the larger industry. Otherwise, Battlemage could quickly become a case of one step forward, two steps back.
More competition is always a good thing
As gamers, we should view Intel's discrete GPU efforts with careful optimism. More competition in a fairly controlled market will always yield benefits for the customers. Thanks to Intel's focus on offering affordable GPUs and improving them continuously, its GPUs definitely deserve your attention. If you want an affordable 1440p GPU or even one of the best 1080p GPUs, Intel Arc is a genuine contender this generation. And come 2024, we could see even better value come out of Team Blue, prompting Nvidia and AMD to cut prices and improve performance.