It’s not often that we talk directly about a product, but one recent occasion led to feeling the need to.
As part of our paid partnership with Intel, SGP provided organization and staffing for a dedicated sim racing area on the Intel stand at the recent Insomnia #i71 Gaming Festival at the NEC in Birmingham. It was our job to set up challenges for the public, organize races for influencers and to welcome people into the world of sim racing.
Alongside some great rigs from Next Level Racing and some fine hardware from Moza Racing we were to use Intel’s own PCs packed with hardware of their choosing, and to be frank this left us a little nervous as none of us had ever experienced an ARC GPU. What would the visual performance be like? Would they stand up to 3 days of trade show heat and constant racing?
In truth many of us had our concerns…
From the first moment though we were proved wrong in our worries.
We tested them hard by turning pretty much everything on to ‘Epic’ in the graphics settings of Assetto Corsa Competizione while running 1080p. The gameplay was smooth and solid and looked impressively good.
Is it a full match to the latest 4090 card on the market? No, but Intel doesn't claim that it is. The ARC GPUs are instead an excellent value for money proposition in a market that has seen crazy prices over the last few years.
Ok so the ARC 770 GPUs looked good, but could they really handle the heat, lack of air, constant racing, and long days of a gaming festival? Well frankly yes, they did far better than I did for starters! While I melted into a sweaty heap each day, these PCs just kept on going without a single crash or concern. From 9.30am to 6pm they ran ACC without missing a beat.
Even more impressive was just how small the GPUs are and how tiny the PCs were that were using them. These very petite units were huge in performance and left us all wondering if Intel really can be titans in the GPU market after all.
To find out more about Intel ARC, and to see the deals available in their Gamer Days promo period visit https://www.intel.com/content/www/uk/en/gaming/promos/gamer-days.html
