Intel says its Arc A770, Arc A750 are both launching 'very soon'

Intel has confirmed that its Arc Alchemist GPUs will be launching "very soon" during a recent interview with PC Games Hardware and Digital Foundry.

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Intel's Ryan Shrout and Tom Peterson with PC Games Hardware

During the interview, Intel GPU marketing duo Ryan Shrout and Tom Peterson said that the desktop launch of Arc will include the Arc A770 and Arc A750 graphics cards. Intel will be launching the Arc A770 SKU with 8GB and 16GB configurations, but the Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition graphics card will only be available in 16GB. AIB partners can choose to have an Arc A770 with either 8GB or 16GB of GDDR6 memory.

We also got to know more about the performance side of Intel Arc A770 and A750, where the Arc A770 will find itself between NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards, but faster than AMD's Radeon RX 6600 XT. Intel is promising ray tracing performance that will match the same graphics cards, but the team did make it clear that the Arc A770 graphics card won't be competing with the GeForce RTX 3070.

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Intel's Ryan Shrout and Tom Peterson with Digital Foundry

The team did have something to make clear for Arc GPU owners in the future: you will need to have ReBAR support enabled. If you don't, Intel's advice is to buy the competitors' GPUs instead. Intel is working on optimizing Arc GPU drivers for systems that don't have ReBAR support, as the GPUs themselves are optimized for large copy operations (burst transactions).

• Read more: Intel GPU ASIC team tease: next-gen Battlemage, Celestial GPUs coming
• Read more: Intel ARC GPU roadmap: Alchemist, Battlemage, Celestial, Druid teased

This means that Intel Arc GPUs aren't optimized for small optimizations, and can lose nearly 40% of their performance with ReBAR not enabled. We shouldn't expect anything to change with the 1st Gen Arc "Alchemist" GPUs, and I'm sure the Intel GPU team is working on that for the upcoming 2nd Gen Arc "Battlemage" and 3rd Gen "Celestial" GPUs that Intel has been teasing in its recent marketing rounds worldwide.

Now, back to when Intel Arc A770 and A750 graphics cards will be launching: we're looking at the A770 and A750 Limited Edition graphics cards from Intel (their reference design cards) available on the official Intel website when they launch. We should expect custom Arc A770 and A750 graphics cards to launch at about the same time, with Tom Peterson not confirming which AIB partners that Intel is working with.

Intel Arc A770 and A750 graphics cards will launch in limited quantities, and only in certain parts of the world -- at least it'll be more than the China-exclusive Arc A300 series GPUs, I guess.