Intel's new $249 GPU price wipes out Nvidia at the entry-level

Intel's budget Arc graphics card just got a little cheaper. The Intel Arc A750 first launched for $289 last year and now, just four months later, it's getting a new low price of $249.

The Arc A750's price cut will be live from today, February 1, and applies to Intel's own-brand Limited Edition model. That price cut is specifically for the US market, but Intel's Tom Peterson confirms that approximately the same price cut will come into place elsewhere around the globe in due time.

The Arc A750 was already my marginal favourite out of the two Alchemist A7 graphics cards first launched in October last year, and its new price makes it more tantalising for gamers on a tight budget.

It's a 1080p graphics card at its heart, though it's fairly suitable for 1440p gaming, depending on the game. With 28 Xe-cores, just four cores shy of the Arc A770's full complement, it's actually not far off the pace of the bigger card in actual gaming performance. With 8GB of GDDR6 memory, it's well-equipped for the sort of resolution and render quality you'd expect of a card with this sort of price tag. It's also surprisingly well-equipped for ray tracing, and comes with support for hardware accelerated AV1 encode.

The new price places the Arc A750 in much closer contention with AMD's cheaper RX 6600 and RX 6600 XT graphics cards in value for money. Back at launch, that was a fight the Arc A750 just couldn't quite win. But this price adjustment means it's on a level footing with the RX 6600, and these two cards trade blows across multiple games at 1080p and 1440p. With ray tracing enabled, Intel actually has a lead on AMD.

There are a few things to consider before you immediately rush off to buy the Arc A750. For one, its power draw is much greater than an RX 6600 or RX 6600 XT. It's possibly the card's biggest drawback, in all honesty. It's not an insignificant amount more power: the Arc A750 draws 211W on average during three runs of Metro Exodus at 4K, while the RX 6600 XT draws 168W. You will also need to be sure your PC parts support Resize BAR to extract top performance out of the Intel Arc A750, it's at a massive loss without it. Lastly, Intel's drivers have been a point of contention since release—they have been inconsistent in performance between games—but as of today Intel is confident it's sorted out DX9 game support for the most part and its drivers are in a much better shape overall.

1080p performance

But Intel's price adjustment does mean the Arc A750 wipes out Nvidia's RTX 3060. That's not too surprising; unlike Intel and AMD, Nvidia's more affordable GPU isn't all that cheap. The cheapest I could find on Newegg today is going for $369, and it's from a manufacturer I'm not too familiar with, Peladn. Intel says with the new price, the Arc A750 offers 52% higher performance per dollar than the RTX 3060, though admittedly Intel is going off an average price for Nvidia's card of $391 for its calculations, which is higher than some on the market.

The RTX 3060, as per the graphs above, is usually leading the Arc A750. That said, it's not too far ahead considering the Arc A750's new price tag, which puts it $120 cheaper than the cheapest RTX 3060 I could find.

Nvidia's cheapest discrete 30-series GPU right now is the RTX 3050, which is on sale for around $290 on Newegg today despite a $249 MSRP. That card is consistently the slowest of the budget GPUs available today, so it's largely a no contest with the Arc A750.

Intel will have to sell enough of these cards to really make a dent versus AMD and Nvidia, however. It's likely Intel's sales numbers are only a small fraction of either red or green team's numbers.

All things considered, though, Intel's new $249 price tag is quite convincing. There's still something to be said for AMD's RX 6000-series on a budget, but I'm all for Intel shaving some precious pennies off its entry-level GPUs while PC gaming today generally struggles with a high minimum cost of entry.