Intel: "Moore's Law is not dead" as Arc A770 GPU is priced at $329

Expand / The Arc A770 GPU, coming from Intel on October 12, starting at $329. Intel

A week after Nvidia pushed forward with some of its highest graphics card prices, Intel came out with some big news: a price for its 2023 graphics cards that lands a little closer to Earth .

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger spoke at the latest Intel Innovation event on Tuesday to confirm a starting price and release date for the upcoming Arc A770 GPU: $329 on October 12.

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This price is well below last week's highest Nvidia GPU prices, but it's supposed to correlate more closely to existing GPUs from AMD and Nvidia in the $300 range. Basically, Intel says its A770, the highest-end product in the company's first wave of graphics cards, will compare or even surpass the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti, which debuted last year at $399 and continue to stick to this price as much as possible. marketplaces.

While we haven't personally tested Intel's pair of 700-series GPUs yet, their tape history indicates comparable hardware, with 4,096 shader units (compared to the 4,864 cores CUDA of the 3060 Ti), 16 GB of GDDR6 RAM (compared to 8 GB of GDDR6 of 3060 Ti) and a boost clock of 2.1 GHz (compared to 1.67 GHz of 3060 Ti). So far, Intel's early feedback to Ars Technica points to higher performance on modern games running DirectX 12, and even improved ray tracing performance thanks to several hardware features targeted to make that performance efficient in existing DX12 RT games. However, Intel also suggested to Ars that in the short term, 3D software running in older APIs would likely suffer from a mix of older Intel GPU drivers and minimal performance optimization.

Intel has yet to announce pricing or a launch window for its other 700-series GPU, the Arc A750. So far, the company has suggested that this GPU, which has lower specs across the board but is otherwise within reach of the A770, will compare directly to Nvidia's RTX 3060 (not Ti). /p>

Enlarge / Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger points to a price chart of Nvidia GPUs in a certain range since the launch of the GTX 650 Ti. Intel

Before announcing the 770's price and release date, Gelsinger pointed to a "performance segment GPU pricing" chart that lists Nvidia's mid-range GPU launches since the GTX 650 Ti. "We are, along with gamers, delivering and hearing complaints about the high prices," Gelsinger said, pointing to the current costs of the RTX 3060 and 3060 Ti models in the wild. "You should be frustrated because you are missing something as a gaming community. And today we are fixing that."

Gelsinger's presentation included several statements that "Moore's Law is not dead", apparently referring to a comment made by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang last week in light of announcements of his company regarding the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080. Gelsinger even stood in front of a slide on its full production pipeline of various chips, stating, "Moore's Law: Alive and Well." He added, "We will continue to be guardians of Moore's Law."