Intel Arc A770 and A750 review: welcome player three

XeSS is a critical piece of the Arc offering: a temporal AI upscaler that operates along similar lines to Nvidia's DLSS. Unlike DLSS, it's available on graphics cards from other manufacturers, but its performance will depend on the hardware available - so expect the best results on Arc.

To get a sense of how XeSS operates, we set the A750 and A770 against Nvidia's RTX 3060. We tested the two games that support XeSS and DLSS right now - Hitman 3 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider - at three resolutions to see which offers the better performance boost at matched settings. We're using the DLSS/XeSS presets that we generally recommend at each resolution - 4K/performance, 1440p/balanced and 1080p/quality. Basically, as our base resolution increases, we can get away with a more performant preset without sacrificing too much visual fidelity. So, how do the upscalers on each card compare?

Let's start with Hitman 3. Here, we see a substantial lead for the Arc cards over the RTX 3060 at 1080p with the quality preset, worth 17 percent and 27 percent for the A770 and A750 respectively. The A770's advantage grows as our output resolution increases, showing the efficiency of Intel's approach. However, the A750 grows the lead at 1440p but shrinks at 4K - perhaps as memory constraints afflict the 8GB card.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider goes somewhat differently. The A750 is nowhere to be found, relatively speaking, while the A770 starts off squarely behind the RTX 3060 at 1080p, closes to a three percent deficit at 1440p and outperforms the RTX 3060 by six percent at 4K.

Exclusive - Intel XeSS ML Upscaling - The Digital Foundry Tech Review - XeSS vs DLSS vs Native!

So Intel's XeSS implementation is certainly robust in terms of the frame-rates it can deliver, while delivering quality that is a tad closer to DLSS 2.0 than FSR 2.0. Overall, a fine first showing and a real feather in Arc's cap - now, Intel just needs more games to adopt it. So far, 21 games have been announced with XeSS support and 13 studios have committed to using the tech in future, including the likes of Codemasters and Ubisoft. Still, with hundreds of DLSS titles announced or released, not to mention a few dozen planned or available FSR 2.0 titles, it will take Team Blue some time to make up the difference.

Intel Arc A770 and A750 analysis

• Introduction, test rig and hardware
• Gears 5, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Doom Eternal
• Cyberpunk 2077, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition
• Red Dead Redemption 2, Control, Forza Horizon 5
• Hitman 3, F1 22
• XeSS testing - Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Hitman 3 [this page]
• Intel Arc A770 and A750 - the Digital Foundry verdict