Intel Arc Rendering Performance Strengths Are Really Understated

When we first took a detailed look at Intel’s Arc graphics cards this past fall, we found ourselves impressed with the performance we were seeing across multiple scenarios. At that time, there was no question that Arc’s graphics drivers were still in bad need of polish, but after our exhaustive testing, we could conclude that most of those driver niggles wouldn’t have affected creator users nearly as much as gamers.

Nonetheless, while the strengths of Intel’s Arc GPUs for encoding purposes has been detailed by many, it feels like its rendering capabilities are largely ignored. How good Arc is at rendering didn’t fully hit us until we published our deep-dive of Blender 3.4 last week.

We’ve considered NVIDIA’s OptiX to be a stable and obvious choice for users to opt for when using Blender’s Cycles engine, but for our previous deep-dive, and due to reader request, we decided to run special tests without OptiX to level the playing field, and see how all three vendors fared without accelerated ray tracing. Here are those results:

Before useful comparisons can be made, it’s worth noting that the closest competition to Intel’s Arc A770 8GB is the AMD Radeon RX 6600 8GB and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB – all of which carry a $329 SRP (real pricing for AMD and Intel tends to be lower; higher for NVIDIA).

In the Secret Deer test, the Arc A770 managed to beat both AMD’s RX 6800 XT and NVIDIA’s RTX 3070 Ti – effectively conquering competition that’s multiple levels above where it sits. Things shift around a bit in the White Lands render, but the A770 still saddles up right beside the RTX 3060 Ti. With Scanlands, we see the same Arc A770 beat out the RX 6800 and RTX 3060 Ti.

Considering the fact that the Arc A770’s main competitor is the RTX 3060, it’s impressive that Intel manages to beat NVIDIA out at something thing it’s really good at.

Naturally, the use of OptiX (as our Blender deep-dive article linked above can attest) changes the picture completely, pushing NVIDIA so far ahead, that it becomes an obvious choice for Blender use. It’s not just with Cycles where that’s the case, but also Eevee and the viewport. Currently, Intel needs some driver polish for both of those angles, so Arc isn’t quite what we’d consider a “well-rounded” choice for Blender at this time. But, potential is there.

To see Intel perform so well in an apples-to-apples comparison makes us hopeful that its upcoming RT acceleration in Blender (~3.6, likely) will be effective enough to actually give OptiX some nice competition. We’re less confident about AMD’s upcoming RT acceleration based on our previous Radeon ProRender results (we’re due for a retest), but we’d like to be surprised.

It goes without saying, but we can’t wait to be able to test all three vendors with their respective RT acceleration features in place.