Get the Intel Arc A750 graphics card for $290
The good ship Rock Paper Shotgun has yet to review the cards - although there is an excellent article announcing them. However, we can rely on the testimony of one ‘Will Judd’ from Digital Foundry, who claims in his Arc A750 review that the A750 and A770 offer “legitimately good rasterised performance in modern games, oversized RT performance and features that range from novel (Smooth Sync, AV1 encode, DisplayPort 2.0) to vital (XeSS) - all at prices that feel reasonable”. More specifically, the A750 is normally around five to ten percent slower than the A770 while costing significantly less, making it the better value choice by some margin. However, its smaller 8GB of VRAM means that you’ll need to turn down texture settings in some games - not a worry for actual gameplay, but one that’s likely to disproportionately affect benchmarks. The only serious issue is performance in DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 games, which is woeful - you are often better off with a card a few generations old than using Arc. This weakness should wane with time, but for now the A750 is best for folks that prefer recent games to older releases. XeSS also makes a strong first impression, although the list of supported games is relatively short. You also get AV1 encode and decode support, which is great for content creators looking to produce higher quality footage at a given bitrate - or lower bitrate footage at a fixed quality level. Either way, you have a good card that should become even better over time as XeSS and AV1 adoption grows and Intel’s driver team continues to improve performance. Overall, this is a great GPU at a solid price - especially with a copy of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (2022) included plus your choice of three software packages - so do pick one up if you’ve been considering it!
