From PC World: It’s a hard time to be a PC gamer on a budget. If you’ve only got $250 to spend on a new graphics card, your only real option has been AMD’s Radeon RX 6600, as prices for GeForce GPUs remain painfully high. No more. Intel is dropping the price of its Arc A750 Limited Edition graphics card to $249 today, a $40 reduction, and making noise about the significant performance and stability increases its debut GPUs have enjoyed since their October launch.
If you’re a regular PCWorld reader, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Intel’s first consumer GPUs launched with bugs and rough edges galore, so we’ve been periodically reevaluating Arc’s performance in a monthly video series. Intel’s drivers are already much more stable than before, and the company recently released new drivers that dramatically improve the raw speed and overall smoothness in DirectX 9 games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and League of Legends.
“Across low- and high-end graphics settings, we’re seeing a 2x increase in frame rates,” we said after testing a handful of titles. Intel says DX9 games now run an average of 43 percent faster than on Arc’s launch driver, and 60 percent smoother. Yes, please.
The focus hasn’t all been on older games though. Coinciding with today’s Arc A750 price drop, Intel is launching another new driver with improvements across a variety of DirectX 11 and 12 games, including a massive 57 percent uplift in Warframe (DX11) performance. That’s vital; our Arc A770 and A750 review showed Intel’s GPU often besting Nvidia’s popular RTX 3060 in ray tracing and DX12 games, but optimizing DX11 titles requires a lot more work from the GPU drivers, and Arc can suffer hard there. Intel hasn’t been shy about saying this will require long-term focus from the team, and they’re clearly putting that work in.
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