by Intel’s budget Arc graphics card just got a little cheaper. The Intel Arc A750 (opens in a new tab) launched for $289 last year and now, just four months later, it’s getting a new low price of $249.
The Arc A750 price drop will be live from today, February 1, and applies to Intel’s own-brand limited-edition model. This price drop is specifically aimed at the US market, but Intel’s Tom Peterson confirms that roughly the same price drop will be rolled out elsewhere in the world in due course.
The Arc A750 was already my favorite of the two Alchemist A7 graphics cards first released in October last year, and its new price makes it more appealing to gamers on a tight budget.
It’s a 1080p graphics card at its core, although it’s quite adequate for 1440p gaming, depending on the game. With 28 Xe cores, just four cores less than the Arc A770 (opens in a new tab) full complement, it’s actually not far off the pace of the larger card in terms of actual gaming performance. With 8GB of GDDR6 memory, it’s well equipped for the kind of resolution and render quality you’d expect from a card with this kind of price. It’s also surprisingly well equipped for ray tracing and supports hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding.
The new price puts the Arc A750 in a much closer position to AMD’s cheaper RX 6600 and RX 6600 XT (opens in a new tab) value for money graphics cards. At launch, it was a fight the Arc A750 simply couldn’t win. But that price tweak means it’s on par with the RX 6600, and those two cards trade blows across multiple games at 1080p and 1440p. With ray tracing enabled, Intel actually has an edge over AMD.
There are a few things to consider before you immediately rush out to buy the Arc A750. On the one hand, its power consumption is much higher than that of an RX 6600 or RX 6600 XT. This is perhaps the card’s biggest downside, in all honesty. That’s not an insignificant amount of extra power: the Arc A750 consumes 211W on average over three Metro Exodus runs at 4K, while the RX 6600 XT draws 168W. your PC support resizing bar to extract the best performance from the Intel Arc A750, it’s at a massive loss without it. Finally, Intel’s drivers have been a point of contention since release – they’ve been inconsistent in terms of performance between games – but to date Intel is confident that it’s mostly ironed out support. DX9 games and its drivers are in much better shape overall.
1080p performance
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But Intel’s price adjustment means the Arc A750 wipes out Nvidia’s RTX 3060. It’s not too surprising; unlike Intel and AMD, Nvidia’s more affordable GPU isn’t that cheap. The cheapest I could find on Newegg today is for $369 (opens in a new tab), and it comes from a manufacturer that I don’t know too well, Peladn. Intel says that with the new price, the Arc A750 offers 52% more performance per dollar than the RTX 3060, although it’s true that Intel is pricing the average Nvidia card of $391 for its computes , which is superior to some on the market.
The RTX 3060, according to the charts above, generally tops the Arc A750. That said, it’s not too far off considering the Arc A750’s new price, which puts it $120 cheaper than the cheapest RTX 3060 I could find.
Nvidia’s cheapest 30-series discrete GPU right now is the RTX 3050, which is on sale for around $290 on Newegg (opens in a new tab) today despite an MSRP of $249. This card is still the slowest of the budget GPUs available today, so it’s largely a no-contest with the Arc A750.
However, Intel will need to sell enough of these cards to really make a dent against AMD and Nvidia. It’s likely that Intel’s sales numbers are only a small fraction of Team Red or Green’s numbers.
All things considered, however, Intel’s new price of $249 is pretty compelling. There’s still something to be said about AMD’s RX 6000 series budget, but I’m all for Intel cutting precious under its entry-level GPUs as PC gaming today generally struggle with a high minimum entry cost.
