As an owner of an A770, I thought I would give prospective buyers my experience with it.
I originally bought it because I was dissatisfied with the performance of my 6600XT. At the time I played alot of Arma 3, which is a horribly optimized. It would run horribly on the card. And performance wasn’t much better in other games as well.
Simply put 8GB of VRAM is simply not enough nowadays. So My personal recommendation is minimum 12GB. (Full Disclaimer: I later found a BIOS setting that was holding back the 6600XT, but the performance in game was a little better, but not by much.)
Once I bought the card and installed it. It ran like a dream. Performance in Arma 3 was much better. and I had no problems. I should mention at this point that I bought this card long after Intel got their drivers properly sorted.
I ran every game I had in my library. I have alot of games from both steam and GOG. And the oldest one, X-wing tie fighter, off of steam ran no problem.
But!
Here are the problems I ran into.
I enjoy racing games. And i have triple 40 inch monitors for that. Now one game I absolutely love is Forza Horizon 5. I was able to run it in triple monitor mode no problem with the 6600 XT. And at first I was able to do so as well with the A770, at 60Hz, the refresh rate of my monitors.
But then they updated their drivers and everything went to shit.
Forza would only output to one monitor even though it showed up as being in triple monitor mode. Now Technically Forza 5 doesn’t officially offer triple monitor support. But there are work arounds that other people used to get it working for them. I tried those but they didn’t work for me. So I would occasionally play Forza but didn’t like only using one screen, so my usage dropped off.
Also for some reason the combined monitors would output to 59.96Hz leading me to get headaches after long play times.
Another game I enjoyed playing in triple monitor mode, is Ghost Recon Breakpoint. But after the driver update it would still output to 48:9 but it was stretching a 16:9 image to do so.
So basically all the problems I encountered is software based. The hardware is excellent, but the software reminds me of AMD when they were still known as ATI.
So intel is the new AMD. for both the good and the bad.
Now. Onto the software.
You can tell Intels graphics software were designed by engineers, because it is remarkably in depth and overly complicated.
With AMD, getting into triple monitor mode is a simple one button press operation. One and done.
Here’s what you have to do to get triple monitors running with Intel for the first time
First you go into the software trying to find the way to get triple monitors working.
Can’t find it so you do some googling.
Find out you have to download ANOTHER piece of software. You do so.
You open said software. Find no instructions on how to do so.
do more googling.
After sifting through a couple of scam videos on youtube you finally find one that describes what you have to do with frustratingly level of nonchalantness. Figure the rest out yourself.
Find out, after sort of getting it to work, you then have to manually align the monitors. Takes multiple attempts to get it right. But finally manage to do so.
Realize the next time you try to get into triple monitor mode you have to do it all over again.
Rinse and repeat.
So. Conclusions.
I think intel will be a force to rekon with once they get the software side of things down pat. But TBH I would do some serious consideration before buying the new card right now.
Intel Arc was Pat Gelsingers baby and with him out the door, I don’t know if Intel plans to keep the Arc line alive. It would be shitty, but perfectly Intel to have a product people like only to kill it due to short term considerations.
I now have a 6700XT 16GB model. And while it’s miles better than the 6600XT, I find that to me personally it feeling like the A770 slightly outperforms it. Even though on paper the 7600XT is supposedly 15% faster. And apparently the B580 outperforms The A770. So make of that what you will.
Anyways i hope this helps you with your buying decisions. Good luck out there.
I doubt they will kill graphics altogether, but it’s possible that Intel will abandon dGPUs and offer “big” integrated GPUs like AMD is already planning in 2025. The driver support is theoretically easier if they stick to IGPs only.
In that arena they would have to go up against AMD’s Halo Strix, which from everything I’ve heard is comparable to a 4060 in performance.
Exactly. It will be expensive at first, but eventually AMD is going to kill the bottom of the dGPU market anyway.
I don’t know how it’s easier, if it’s the same arch they should share most of the codebase
Memory allocations and transfers are much less complicated on a IGP, which AFAIK was an issue with the original A770 launch.
So 60 hertz didn’t cause headaches, but 59.96hz did?
That doesn’t seem true
I agree that it’s purely anecdotal, but that’s what happened to me.
I’m very much an AMD guy and need to replace my Vega 56 asap. I’d still love for Intel to deliver a good product with the A770’s successor. I don’t wish that company well in general, but we absolutely need more competition for nVidia. And we can’t just look at the high end segment.
I’m very much an AMD guy and need to replace my Vega 56 asap.
Why? I have the same card and am still reasonably satisfied with it, but I’m wondering if you know something I don’t.
I purchased the Mafia remake some time this year and had to realize that it can’t run that game at decent framerates. I don’t necessarily need 1440p at 100+ fps, but somewhat stable at 60 would be good. I decided to put the game on my pile of shame until I have a new GPU. Even the 7900 GRE will on average be at least 3x faster than Vega 64.
Vega has served me very well though and I don’t regret building a 500€ custom loop around the 400€ card back in 2017.
It all depends on the games and resolutions you play at. If you play the latest AAA games at 4k it won’t cut the mustard. It’s also a very loud and hot card for what it does. Both idle and under load.
It’s a 7 year old GPU, tech has vastly moved on. Even some of the worst video cards are miles ahead in performance.
My friend, I bought 7600XT, and it performs beautifully. But I would wait to see what AMD is going to release next year.
Software is the biggest problem, made even bigger because if Intel decides to abandon their dedicated graphics line then customers will be stuck with busted drivers. I’m hoping they keep things going to reintroduce some competition into the graphics card space. Prices are just ridiculous now, so it’s great seeing the B580 performing well at $250. Such a shame Intel’s board of directors seems determined to sink the company and sell it for parts.
Maybe Pat will pray and fast to make sure Arc cards continue to be supported.
What was the BIOS setting issue?
Not OP, but my best guess is resizable bar?
The thing is, Resizable Bar would benefit both cards. So I’m confused why he phrased it in such a way.
They said they had a mis-set PCIe slot configuration.
my PCIe slot was set to gen3 X8. Not gen4 X16.
Ah, thank you.
Adding A side note here. I forgot to mention that I also had issues with VR with my Quest 2. Some games simply would not run in VR mode purely because of the GPU.
If you didn’t know, you can edit your post. VR is a big requirement for me.
Thx for letting me know.
I was rather disappointed to see Pat being removed. Intel could do with a “shush the shareholders” kinda thing. However that might be called.
To my knowledge they killed more than a few super expensive projects :/
I’ve been using an A750 for the past year on Linux and have been very happy with it. It has kernel level support and can run Blender pretty well.
Agreed, the problems I had were fairly niche, but I felt people should know the good and the bad. The A770 runs beautifully in 99% of the games I own, it’s just that for me it wasn’t doing the job for the ones that were my favorite at the time… Like i said All problems I had were software based. once they crack that nut, Intel would be unstoppable.
