I’ve been using Intel Arc graphics from day one, and I haven’t looked back. Part of that is wanting to support the newcomer and help drive competition, but a bigger part is my appreciation of truly impressive, more affordable hardware. Intel has a year of work in the Arc platform under its belt now, and with a Black Friday deal this good on a Sparkle A750, now is definitely a good time to join the blue team.
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The Intel Arc A750 goes toe-to-toe with more expensive graphics cards
Of the current Intel Arc lineup, the A750 is the sweet spot. While the A770 is a little more powerful, in my experience the difference between the two isn’t huge. The lower asking price of the A750 makes the small performance sacrifice worth it. Especially when it’s this cheap.
More impressively, the Intel Arc A750 can go toe-to-toe with the NVIDIA RTX 3060, albeit when you don’t factor ray tracing into the equation. Then again, I’d question whether ray tracing is worth it at all if you’re buying a budget graphics card, though the Arc A750 can do it.
The RTX 3060, even when discounted during an event like Black Friday, is still substantially more expensive. The A750 runs very close to the RTX 3060 at 1080p, even 1440p, and the XeSS upscaler is improving all the time. One area Intel has the upper hand, though, is that even its budget graphics cards have a hardware AV1 encoder, something NVIDIA only added on the RTX 40 series.
I’ve obviously been following Intel’s continued development first-hand, and as impressed as I was at launch, things are so much better now. Modern titles have always worked pretty well, but Intel has focused on delivering big improvements in older DX11, and even DX9 games. The latter is particularly impressive given that there’s no hardware support for DX9 on Arc.
Ultimately, at $180 you simply cannot do better right now if you’re looking for a graphics card. This Sparkle version is also the best looking of them all, with a cool blue paint job. I was disappointed on Prime Day that there weren’t any Intel discounts, but I’m excited about this one. Join me on team underdog, I promise you won’t regret it.
