Intel Arc A770 And A750 Limited Edition Review: Putting Alchemist To The Test
Intel Arc A750 And A770 Limited Edition: Compute, Rendering And Encoding Tests
We tested all of the graphics cards represented in this article on a Gigabyte X570 Pro Wi-Fi motherboard, equipped with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR4 RAM clocked at 3,200MHz. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" defaults, then we disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use, and enabled Resizable BAR support. The memory's clock was dialed in to its optimal performance settings using its XMP profile and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 11 Professional was installed and fully updated. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, applications and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.
Our Test System Configuration:
| Hardware Used: AMD Ryzen 9 5800X3D (3.4GHz - 4.5GHz, 8-Core) Gigabyte Aorus X570 Pro Wi-Fi 16GB G.SKILL DDR4-3200 Samsung SSD 970 EVO Integrated Audio / Network NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT Intel Arc A750 Limited Edition Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition Relevant Software: Windows 11 Pro 22H2 AMD Radeon x22.9.1 NVIDIA Drivers v517.48 Intel Arc Drivers v31.0.101.3435 |
Benchmarks Used: SPECviewperf 2020 v3.1 LuxMark v4 Blender v3.3.0 SiSoft SANDRA 2021 Blackmagic RAW Speed Test v2.6 IndigoBench v4.4.15 UL 3DMark UL VRMark Unigine Superposition CryTek Neon Noir Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Assassin's Creed Valhalla FarCry 6 Forza Horizon 5 F1 2022 Hitman 3 Guardians Of The Galaxy |
Although Intel's Arc A750 And A770 Limited Edition cards target gamers and are not specifically meant for pro-vis or enterprise applications, we thought it would be interesting to run some compute and rendering tests to see how the cards stack up with these workloads, relative to the competition. Don't worry -- we'll get to a bunch of game tests soon as well...
SiSoft SANDRA 2021 GPGPU Benchmarks
SANDRA's GPGPU Image Processing benchmark runs through an array of filters on its reference data and offers up an aggregate score, derived from a multitude of individual results. Its GPGPU Cryptography benchmark churns through an assortment of workloads, and presents individual results for overall bandwidth, AES256 encryption and decryption, and SHA2-256 hashing bandwidth. CUDA and OpenCL code paths are available in these tests, but we used OpenCL on all cards. Previously, using the CUDA path with NVIDIA GPUs resulted in better performance, but OpenCL actually outperforms CUDA in the latest versions of this test.
The Intel Arc A750 And A770 Limited Edition came out swinging and outran the Radeon RX 6600 XT and GeForce RTX 3060 here. The A770 LE also manages a >10% gain over the A750 LE, thanks to its higher clocked GPU and memory, and larger 16GB memory complement.
SANDRA's Cryptography benchmarks show mixed results for the Intel Arc A750 And A770 Limited Edition. The cards are sandwiched by the 6600 XT and RTX 3060 in the Cryptographic bandwidth test, but trail the other cards by a wide margin in the AES Encryption / Decryption tests. In terms of hashing bandwidth, the Arc A750 And A770 come out on top, thanks to their fat memory pipe and raw memory bandwidth advantages.
LuxMark v4.0 Benchmarks
LuxMark is a cross-platform, OpenCL-accelerated 3D rendering benchmark. It's a tool based on the open source LuxRender physically-based spectral rendering engine, which accurately models the transportation of light and supports high dynamic range. LuxRender features a number of material types to allow rendering of photo-realistic and artistic scenes. LuxRender is free software, licensed under the GPL, that offers plugins for packages like Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D and 3DS Max.
The Arc A750 And A770's strong compute performance and relatively high memory bandwidth also propel them into a clear lead with both of the scenes we tested with Luxmark.
IndigoBench Rendering Benchmarks
IndigoBench is based on Indigo 4's advanced rendering engine and offers both CPU and GPU rendering modes for its two built-in models. The standalone benchmark is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux and outputs results in M/Samples per second.
This benchmark has been well optimized for NVIDIA's GPUs over the years, but even still the Arc A750 And A770 Limited Edition put up a relatively strong showing. Intel's new GPU outrun the GeForce RTX 3060 with the more taxing bedroom scene and clearly outpace the Radeon RX 6600 XT.
Blender v3.3.0 GPU Rendering Benchmarks
Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. The developers offer a standalone benchmarking tool that will track performance while rendering a handful of models. We used all three of the default models for these tests...
SPECviewperf 2020 v3.1 Benchmarks
Next up we have some numbers from SPECviewperf 2020 v3.1, the latest version of the venerable SPEC benchmark as of this article's publication. The entire test suite has been overhauled for this version, and it includes a new extensible architecture that's designed to make SVP easier to customize and adapt for a variety of workloads. The test also includes new medical and energy datasets, updated classic viewsets, and includes a test for Autodesk Showcase.
SPECviewperf includes a variety of tests, which produce significantly different framerates, so we've sorted them into three groups to make the results a bit easier to sort through. Please note the legends at the bottom of each chart, which designate the application or viewset used...
The Intel Arc A750 And A770 Limited Edition offered mixed results in SPECviewperf. With these tests, AMD's consumer Radeon drivers are clearly more optimized than NVIDIA's or Intel's, as evidenced by strong performance throughout. The Arc A750 And A770 Limited Edition did notch a couple of victories over the GeForce RTX 3060, but also failed to complete a few of the tests. snx-04 failed to complete on either Arc GPU, and for some unknown reason, solidworks-07 completed properly on the A750 LE, but wouldn't run properly on the A770 LE, whether run on its own or part of a "full" submissible benchmark run. That doesn't quite make sense, but we've mentioned it to Intel and suspect their driver team will be looking into it.
SPECviewperf includes a variety of tests, which produce significantly different framerates, so we've sorted them into three groups to make the results a bit easier to sort through. Please note the legends at the bottom of each chart, which designate the application or viewset used...
Blackmagic RAW Speed Test Results
The Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is a CPU and GPU benchmarking tool that tests the speed of decoding full-resolution Blackmagic RAW frames. The tool can be used to evaluate the performance at various resolutions and bitrates on the CPU or using OpenCL on a GPU. We're reporting two results here, both at an 8K resolution, but at differing bitrates and compression levels.
Once again we see the Intel Arc A750 And A770 Limited Edition sandwiched by the GeForce RTX 3060 and Radeon RX 6600 XT. With the more taxing, less-compressed workload, the Intel Arc A750 And A770 Limited Edition come within about 10% - 11% of the 3060, but the GeForce pulls ahead by a larger margin with the more-compressed workload. With both workloads, however, Intel's new Arc GPUs clearly outrun the Radeon.
