Intel has just launched its brand new graphics cards, the ARC A750 and A770. Admittedly, these two models cannot compete in terms of performance with cards like the GeForce 3080, 3090 or the very recent GeForce 4090. Except on one point: video decompression.
That’s it, Intel’s ARC A770 is widely available. Equipped with 16 GB of memory, it is displayed at only 459 euros in France. A really relatively low price, which puts it on the same level as Nvidia’s RTX 3060. Is it a card with very average performance for all that? Despite its floor price, the first returns are quite good.
Nevertheless, Intel will have to suffer some setbacks, because the card consumes a lot (even at rest, a shame) and its drivers are not free from bugs of all kinds. Not enough to make it a second-rate card, but the founder will still have to make some efforts. But there is one area where the ARC A770 outperforms even the most expensive competing graphics cards. We told you about it a few months ago, ARC GPUs support the AV1 format 100%.
The ARC A770 is the champion in AV1 video decoding
let’s remember that AV1 is a video codec launched in 2018. It is the work among others from Intel, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Netflix. This is an Open Source format that offers a better level of compression than H.265 (up to 40% gain) and H.264 (up to 50% gain). It can be found today on YouTube, Netflix and other streaming platforms.
The creator of the “CapFrameX” analysis tool has just posted the results concerning decompression of AV1 videos in 8K and 4K. The benchmark was performed using 4 graphics cards:
- an Intel ARC A770
- a GeForce RTX 4090
- a GeForce RTX 3090
- A Radeon RX 6800 XT
The test video, accessible on YouTube and titled Japan in 8K 60fps, was launched from the Chrome browser. And the result is clear: the ARC A770 peaks at 59.9 FPS on average, while the RTX 4090 shows 57.6 FPS. Note that the gap with the RTX 3090 is not that big (56.8 FPS), but the RX 6800 XT ends up in the cabbage.
The same bench in 4K still places the ARC A770 in pole position, but the gap with the RTX 3090 and 4090 is only 0.1 FPS. In other words, the difference is zero.
Anyway, the new graphics card from Intel has a card to play against the competition. Even if we cannot reasonably compare an ARC A770 to a GeForce 4090 or a 3090 for video games, Intel offers a card that holds up for video playback. We now hope that in terms of encoding the card will also live up to all expectations, as announced by Intel last April.
Source: CapFrameX