by Intel has announced a price drop for its first-party edition of the Arc A750 graphic cardbringing the cost down from its introductory price of $289 to $249 just four months after the card’s release.
It’s a bold move from Intel, which has yet to gain significant traction in the GPU market through its recently launched Arc series of cards. The Arc A770 and A750 were launched in October last year and while they performed reasonably well, 2022 was definitely more of a triumph for Team Blue’s CPUs, while the GPU department endured endless struggles.
The A750 is still the second most powerful card in the current Arc desktop range – although leaks suggest it’s heavier Battlemage GPUs will arrive in 2024 – and it was already reasonably priced at $289 given its performance. The price reduction currently only applies to the US market, but Intel has stated that a similar reduction will follow in other regions.
The A750 is rumored to be a 1080p card (although 1440p is definitely an option in many games) and competes in performance with AMD’s RX 6600 And Nvidia’s RTX 3060.
While the Nvidia card falls slightly ahead on average, it’s also a fair bit more expensive at the moment; You’ll be lucky to find an RTX 3060 south of $350 right now, despite matching the $330 MSRP of the RX 6600 — a card that performs much closer to Intel’s rivals in most games.
Intel is making inroads into the budget gaming space, but only AMD should be really concerned
It’s worth noting that here we’re comparing the A750 to two two-year-old GPUs. That’s mostly because Nvidia and AMD haven’t released any “budget” cards from their respective current-gen lineups, with the cheapest card released to date being $799 RTX 4070 Ti.
Nvidia would no doubt consider the 4070 Ti a “mid-range” card, with plans for RTX 4060 and 4050 GPUs to cover the budget later, but let’s face it: $799 isn’t a mid-range price tag. That’s the same price as the RTX 3080, which was a decidedly premium card back when it launched.
With that in mind, we’re going to make a bold statement here: while the A750 may blow the RTX 3060 out of the water right now, Nvidia just doesn’t care about the budget GPU market anymore. The sky-high prices for RTX 4000 GPUs (combined with constant online scalping, which makes matters worse) show that Team Green is more comfortable at the premium end of the scale. goes all-in on his omniverse nonsense for professional developers with powerful – and expensive – AI-powered graphics cards.
AMD, on the other hand, is trying to make itself the gamer’s choice, insisting that Moore’s Law is alive and well and that its GPUs won’t see repeated price increases for generations. If Team Red can’t match Nvidia’s performance at the high-end, the most logical approach is to offer better value for money cheaper tickets instead of this.
However, the Intel Arc GPUs have the potential to really thwart this work; Team Red has issued some serious price cuts for the Best AMD graphics cards from the previous (6000 series) generation, and now Team Blue have teamed up to lower the bar even lower.
$249 for a very competent 1080p/1440p gaming GPU with solid ray tracing support is actually pretty crazy. The Arc A750 goes toe-to-toe with the AMD RX 6600 (and even the RX 6600 XT) in most games and even beats AMD in ray tracing tests. It does draw a little more power than the RX 6600, but Intel’s continuous performance improvements via driver updates mean the A750 is extremely competitive at this new price point.
AMD – and possibly Nvidia as well – will certainly have a chance to regain some budget ground with lower-end cards from their next-gen lineup this year, but Intel is clearly not playing around; For anyone looking to build a no-fuss 1080p gaming PC, the A750 is the new best choice right now.
