Intel: Gamers on Old PCs Should Stick to NVIDIA/AMD GPUs, Arc A770 to be Slower than the RTX 3070

Intel’s marketing team has made some glaring statements. Former NVIDIA engineer (now part of Intel) Tom Petersen explained to Digital Foundry and PCGH that the Arc A series flagship will come in 8GB and 16GB variants. Furthermore, the Arc A770 will be a competitor to the GeForce RTX 3060 and the 3060 Ti rather than the 3070.

The other interesting bit concerns resizable BAR support (ReBAR). Although Intel’s graphics driver team is working to optimize games on systems not supporting ReBAR, Petersen advised gamers to stick with other vendors vis-à-vis NVIDIA and AMD if their PCs lack support for the same.

The Intel Arc “Alchemist” graphics architecture is designed for large copy operations (burst transactions). This results in a fat overhead (of almost 40%) when dealing with multiple small operations, something ReBAR does on account of the smaller address space.

Intel’s marketing team also admitted that releasing the GPUs in China (only) wasn’t too wise, conceding that the primary reason behind the repeated delays has been an immature platform rather than a supply shortage.