Intel Arc A770 vs AMD Radeon RX 6600: Which is the better buy for gaming?

The Intel Arc A770 graphics card will be available starting October 12, 2022. The GPU is a top-of-the-line Arc Alchemist variant that packs 23 Xe cores, support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and the company's temporal upscaling technology, XeSS. It will be available in two variants, one with 8 GB GDDR6 VRAM and the other with 16 GB GDDR6.

Intel has priced the video card at $329 for the 8 GB variant and $349 for the 16 GB variant. Alongside the Limited Edition reference card, users can also pick up third-party AIB versions from companies like MSI, Gungnir, ASRock, Acer, and more.

Among the chief competitors to these cards are Nvidia's RTX 3060 and AMD's Radeon RX 6600. While Intel has showcased several improvements in performance and value, it has been relatively silent about AMD's $250 budget offering.

Note: This article is subjective and solely reflects the opinions of the writer

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Intel's Arc A770 is a bad bet for gamers right now

The Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition card (Image via Intel)

Although the highest-end variant in the Intel Arc Alchemist lineup is a solid GPU, it has quite a few problems, including poor drivers. Several early users have reported multiple freezing issues and random crashes.

Other problems include poor performance in games using APIs other than DirectX 12. This is specifically true for games using DirectX 9. The best performance can only be expected in titles that have been optimized to run well on Arc Alchemist GPUs.

This can be observed pretty well across benchmarks shared online. In quite easy-to-run DirectX 9-based titles like League of Legends and Counter Strike: Global Offensive Offensive, the Intel GPU fares worse than some extremely old Maxwell-based graphics cards.

When compared to AMD's Radeon RX 6600, the Intel graphics card is not much faster. The RX 6600 easily beats the ARC A770 in several titles that rely on pure rasterization performance, like Total Warhammer 3 and F1 2022. The RX 6600 GPU achieves these feats while costing less and consuming less power.

Intel clearly failed to achieve their target performance metrics with the Arc Alchemist lineup of graphics cards. The A770 is based on a GPU die that is similar in size to that of the RTX 3070. However, it only performs slightly better or worse than RTX 3060 depending on the workload.

Thus, for users who will mainly use their systems for gaming, Intel GPUs are a bad bet as of now. The AMD RX 6600 is a cheaper, more power-efficient, and more widely available card. It also beats the ARC A770 16 GB card in several video games and benchmarks. The Intel GPU is almost $100 costlier than the RX 6600.

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Conclusion

Intel has created a solid product with its first generation of GPUs. Arc Alchemist GPUs are a serious threat to Nvidia Geforce graphics cards, which enjoy the majority of the market share.

Although Team Blue's offerings are not as value-for-money when compared to AMD Radeon GPUs, the company will improve its formula with upcoming iterations and driver updates.

However, for now, the AMD RX 6600 is a better buy for most gamers. Considering the current state of Intel Arc, only users who want something new or a fun toy to play around with on a budget can consider the A770.