Battle of the $250 GPUs: Intel’s Arc A750 beats the Radeon RX 6600 in 1440p, but power consumption is still a thick issue

An interesting video comparison between two graphics cards under $250, the Intel Arc A750 and AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 non-XT, has been published by Techtesters. Neither variant is a high-end gaming card, of course, but for many gamers out there, it’s still a decent option.

With the recently announced price reduction for the Arc A750 to $249, Intel’s option now looks even better, especially considering that this relatively new architecture only made its debut last year. The Arc A750 is based on Intel’s best Alchemist ACM-G10 GPU, but it has been reduced to 28 of 32 available Xe cores. Still, both cards offer a similar number of GPU cores (Radeon has 28 compute units), but Arc has more FP32 cores (3584 vs. 1792). In addition, both GPUs have the same memory capacity of 8 GB GDDR6, but Arc has a memory bus that is twice as wide. In this comparison, the numbers are on Intel’s side, but not in all cases. The A750 has only one major drawback: a TBP of 225W, which is far higher than the RX 6600’s 132W. But more about that later.

Techtesters threw both cards into battle at 1080p and 1440p resolutions with game settings on high or ultra. The results were determined with the latest drivers and on a modern Ryzen 5 7600X platform. At 1080p, the A750 Limited Edition was about 3% slower on average than Gigabyte’s Radeon RX 6600 (not overclocked), but Arc’s higher memory bandwidth shows its strength at 1440p resolution, where Intel leads by 9% on average. When gaming, the Intel A750 consumes 167W, which is not as bad as the official TDP value of 225W, but still higher than the 121W of the RX 6600 measured by Techtesters. However, Arc still has a problem with idle power consumption at 35W, almost 9 times higher than Radeon.

A very interesting approach of Techtesters is to show the long-term GPU usage and its costs. The time in which the GPU is actually not used is also taken into account. Depending on the cost of energy, this can be a deciding factor in choosing a new GPU, especially for those living in Europe where energy costs are higher. The cost of using the A750 could double in 4 years if the card is used 2 hours per day for gaming and 8 hours idle, and the energy cost is 50 cents per kWh. Intel is aware of the idle power issue with the Arc Alchemist GPUs. The company has presented a solution that requires changes to Windows and BIOS, but does not always work.

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