Intel is now the newest player on the GPU market. The company finally launched the Arc Alchemist GPUs. These products are the first generation of a company that is almost completely new to making desktop-grade graphics. Arc A770 & A750Modern features such as Ray Tracing are supported.
Intel Arc actually supports Ray TracingYou might be surprised at the results, just as Nvidia and AMD do.
Is Intel Arc capable of ray-tracing?
Nvidia’s Turing architecture was introduced in 2018 with ray-tracing capabilities. However, not all Turing GPUs had this support. All RTX 20 series cards had ray tracing support, but only the GTX 16-series cards at the lower end to midrange GTX 16 ranges. This is because they use significantly less complex silicon.
Given that Arc is both Intel’s first attempt at Gaming GPUs for the Desktop and also Intel’s first ray tracing-capable GPU, you might wonder if only the higher-end Arc cards have ray tracing support. All Arc GPUs, including the A310, have the hardware required for ray-tracing.
Arc supports Ray Tracing in Software DirectX 12And Vulkan titlesThis is a list of almost all games with ray tracing. Arc now has software compatibility on par with Nvidia or AMD.
Intel Arc Alchemist Ray Tracing Benchmarks
Of course, being able to turn on ray tracing doesn’t mean much if the performance is bad. Again, this is a first-generation product for Intel in multiple aspects, and you’d be justified in being a bit skeptical about whether or not Arc can really perform. As you can see, Arc is capable of performing as expected. Review of Arc A770 & A750These midrange cards can actually do ray tracing quite well.
The average is The A770 runs 18% faster than RTX 3060Only 12% slower than the RTX 3060Ti. AMD’s midrange GPUs can’t really hold a candle to Intel or Nvidia, which means that Arc is in at least second place in the ray tracing game.
It is important to point out that ray tracing is extremely resource intensive and on midrange GPUs, the frame rate can be so low that there’s no point in enabling it.
In Cyberpunk 2077 which we tested at 1080p and with ray tracing set to Ultra, the performance wasn’t very good on Intel Arc or any other GPU, with only the RTX 3060 Ti achieving above 30 frames per second (fps). But that’s not the case for other games.
In Metro ExodusAll GPUs could achieve playable frame rates when tested using similar settings. This benchmark saw the A770 and A750 lead, beating the RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 by a substantial margin. All three GPUs (Intel AMD Nvidia) can enable raytracing in all games. However, they are not designed for gamers who want to use raytracing in every game.
We haven’t tested lower-end Arc GPUs like the A380 or the A310, but based on the spec sheet alone, we can probably guess that they have very poor ray tracing performance. The A770 has 32 Ray Tracing Units (or RTUs), whereas the A380 and A310 have eight. The A310 has six. This means that the A380 has only a fourth as many RTUs as the A770.
Early reviews of the Arc A380It was found that the GPU could barely reach 30 FPS in a few titles at 1080p. That is not good to say. Ray tracing is technically supported throughout the stack, but it depends on the performance of the individual cards. However, the A770 and A750 have at least some reason to support Ray Tracing.
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