I swapped my NVidia RTX 4070 for an Intel ARC A770. Am I crazy?
Ever since Intel released it’s first ARC GPUs to consumers I had been wanting to try one. It didn’t make sense to do early on as the drivers were beyond terrible, but as of this point in 2024 Intel had seemed to have made a lot of progress. In wanting to support ARC I decided to sell my NVidia RTX 4070 and picked up the Acer Predator A770; a great looking GPU for the total sum of £300.
This might seem a bit of a wild move to make but I was fairly confident it would meet my gaming needs and more. After removing all of the NVidia software and drivers I popped it in and had no issues getting it to work. Software was simple enough to use and I was able to get it to output to a display instantly.
The first thing I noticed, which should have been obvious is that this card is definitely not in the same tier as a 4070 for gaming. However I was still getting very consistent frame rates in the likes of Counter-Strike 2 and Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Well over 100fps. I even played an older RTS title called Supreme Commander with no issues. Final Fantasy XIV which has a lot more going on in game ran just fine as well. There’s sometimes artifacts to be seen within the shadows on Supreme Commander as well as an occasional frame rate bug on CS2 but these have been the biggest issues that I’ve come across.
When it comes to video editing I use Davinci Resolve. This is free software but offers the option of rendering video using the AV1 encoder. It was one of the reasons I bought the RTX 4070 to begin with but the option never appeared. I found out later that you need the Studio version of the software which costs hundreds to allow this to work. However when I went to render my first video since getting the Arc A770 I noticed that the option was now there. Very happy, but also kind of ridiculous for NVidia users. Worth mentioning as well that the media engine is supremely good. Now I just need an Intel CPU to pair with QuickSync!
So lots of positives to take from my experience with Intel Arc, but I hear you ask; surely there had to be some issues? And yes there are. It’s nothing major but the biggest issue I have when using my PC is that it hangs more often when loading programs or doing things within the likes of Telegram or Discord. It doesn’t feel like a totally smooth experience when compared to how it was with the RTX 4070. But I can deal with that. I’m actually benefitting from the swap, in particular because I can now render videos using AV1. The rest should keep improving.
No regrets!
