Reviews

Intel’s Arc 750 is one year old and keeps improving

Intel releases a new driver that provides users with yet another performance boost.

Jon Peddie

Intel continues to improve its drivers providing performance bumps for the Arc A750 and A770. We tested the new 31.0.101.4885 on various games to see what kind of boost the new software provides to the graphics cards.

ARC A750
Intel’s Arc 750 in its natural environment. (Source: JPR)

What do we think? Intel’s Arc 700 series is now one year old. After a series of delays before launch, it was initially feared that the A750 and A770 would fall flat; however, both graphics cards received favorable reviews when they were finally released in October 2022. Over the past year, Intel has continued to support the add-in boards with a series of driver updates that have improved the performance of both cards, as Intel’s dedication to improving its software could pay dividends for the future launch of the second-generation Battlemage line, set to be released in 2024.

Intel releases the latest driver for the Arc A750 and A770—how does it fare in our testing?

On the heels of Intel’s Q3’23 update that was released in August and featured the rollout of its new Balanced Build program and big improvements to DX9- and DX11-based games, last week Intel introduced its latest driver for the Arc 700 series. Intel touts that its new driver (31.0.101.4885) can provide up to a 119% performance gain in some games. Some of the biggest performance gains are listed in the following table.

GamePercentage performance gainSettings
Forza Motorsport (DX12)19%1440p with High settings
  Resident Evil 427%1080p with High Ray Tracing settings
The Last of Us Part 1 (DX12)12%1080p with Ultra settings
War Thunder (DX11)9%1080p with Maximum settings
Payday 3 (DX11)37%1080p with Ultra settings
Naraka: Bladepoint* (DX11)5%1080p with Highest settings
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege (DX11)32%1080p with Ultra settings
Final Fantasy XIV Online (DX11)7%1080p with Ultra settings
Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition (DX11)42%1080p with Ultra settings
Call of Duty: Black Ops III (DX11)88%1080p with High settings
Total War: Warhammer II (DX11)10%1080p with Ultra settings
Tomb Raider (DX11)10%1080p with Ultra settings
Mad Max (DX11)6%1080p with Very High settings
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (DX11)14%1080p with Ultra settings
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (DX11)90%1080p with Extra settings
Deus Ex: Human Revolution (DX11)119%1080p with High settings
Call of Duty: Black Ops IV (DX11)8%1080p with Very High settings
BeamNG.drive (DX11)10%1080p with High settings
Kingdom Come: Deliverance (DX11)22%1080p with Ultra High settings
Divinity: Original SinEnhanced Edition (DX11)9%1080p with Ultra settings

Table 1: Intel’s reported performance gains for the Arc A-series graphics cards with the 31.0.101.4885 driver.

These are very impressive numbers, but Intel did not include average framerates for the games listed.

Our latest test results for Intel’s A-series with the latest driver release

We downloaded the new 31.0.101.4885 driver and tested it with various games on the Arc A750. We focused our tests on the 1440p resolution since it is quickly becoming the most popular resolution for gamers.

Test bed and hardware
  • CPUIntel Core-i9-12900K
  • EVGA Z690 Classified 1.2.0 main board
  • Windows 11 Pro X64 OS
  • Samsung 980 Pro 1TB SSD
  • Intel Arc A750 Limited Edition graphics add-in board
Test results

Following Intel’s numbers where they found gains ranging from 6% to 119%, we also found dynamic results. The Arc 750 improved as much as 79% when running Far Cry 6 at 1440p at the High graphics preset and as little as 0% improvement in Chernobylite. The following table shows our test results and percentage performance gains.

GameSettingsIntel A750 Avg. FPSIntel A750 Avg. FPS (w/new 4885 driver)Percentage gain
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla1440p High preset61668%
Chernobylite1440p High preset88902%
Cyberpunk 20771440p Medium preset455829%
Far Cry 61440p Ultra preset457567%
Godfall1440p62689%
Guardians of the Galaxy1440p High preset759121%
Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition1440p High preset70734%
Red Dead Redemption II1440p Medium preset819011%
Watch Dog: Legion1440p Medium preset537643%
Wolfenstein: Youngblood1440p Mein Leben – Riverside1251379%
Wolfenstein: Youngblood1440p Mein Leben – Lab14617318%

Table 2: Arc 750 performance gain with the latest driver release.

Over our 11-game suite and multiple tests, the Arc A750 saw an average of 20% performance gain with the new 31.0.101.4885 driver in 1440p resolution, with some games seeing as much as a 67% FPS gain while others remaining flat from driver to driver.

Cyberpunk graph
The A750 FPS improvement with Intel’s latest driver release running Cyberpunk 2077.

Intel continues to improve the performance of the A-series line of graphics cards via driver improvements. Intel admitted during its Q3 2023 conference call that the drivers at launch were not ready for prime time, especially when it came to DX11 and DX games. The company continues to invest in improving the drivers for the A750 and A770. This investment and work experience gained by these optimizations will only help when it comes to the rollout of its second-generation Battlemage series in 2024.