The launch of Intel's Arc Alchemist series draws closer. We don't yet have a clear understanding of how the various cards will compete with their AMD and Nvidia competitors, but hints are emerging, including a new Geekbench 5 OpenCL benchmark for the Arc A770. The A770 is believed to be the flagship of Arc family.
According to the Geekbench 5 submission, (via Benchleaks and Tom's Hardware), the card has 512 compute units, clocked at a maximum frequency of 2400MHz. The memory is reported at 12.7GB, but that could be a reporting error. If we assume that the reported configuration is otherwise accurate, then this is the full ACM-G10 GPU.
OpenCL is a framework for heterogenous computing across different types of processors, including CPUs and GPUs. It's not an indicator of gaming performance, nevertheless, it gives us a peek at what kind of compute performance the card has against its competitors.
The A770 returns an OpenCL score of 85585. This compares to a GeForce RTX 2070 at 85818 and a Radeon RX 6600 XT at 82559. So, that's not exactly a stellar number for the Intel entry. For example, an RTX 3080 scores around 181,000, while a 6800 XT scores 157,000. It means that the A770 as configured is a long way behind high end AMD and Nvidia offerings. It's possible that the Intel 9600K processor used for the Arc result is causing a performance bottleneck.
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Again though, it's important to remember that OpenCL performance isn't reflective of gaming performance. Just look at the 6800 XT and 3080 results above. Though a 3080 holds a healthy lead over a 6800 XT, they are much closer in gaming performance. Pinch of salt required.
Intel is ramping up its marketing campaign. We've seen a few teasers now including a slick preview video, and a demonstration of XeSS, which is Intel's image upscaling technology. The company has also talked a little about its video engine, which includes full AV1 encode and decode support.
What remains to be seen is actual real-world gaming performance. Only then will we have a better understanding of just how Intel's first generation of GPUs stand up against those from AMD and Nvidia. We can expect the cards to launch sometime over the summer, or winter for our southern hemisphere friends.
