Intel Arc 3 month performance check-in: Impressive Call of Duty gains

Another month, another dutiful report on the state of Intel’s fledgling GPU drivers for its Arc series of graphics cards from PCWorld contributor Keith May. February sees the introduction of a new game to the roundup, the eye-catching but temperamental Forspoken, and some surprising framerate gains for a staple title. Plus, some exciting news that occurred mere hours after Keith’s video published: Intel is slashing the Arc A750’s price to $249!

Compared to last month’s driver release, the Arc A770 driver didn’t change much for most of our testing titles. In GTA V, Counter-Strike GO, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Total War: Troy, Borderlands 3, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Watch Dogs Legion, and Cyberpunk 2077, the results for the three-month test were in line with (or slightly behind) the two-month test. That’s a particular bummer for Cyberpunk, which just got a DLSS boost on the latest Nvidia cards.

There was one standout: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Whatever special sauce Intel put into the new driver, it’s showing about a 5-10 percent improvement across the board, while 1 percent lows saw a noticeable bump up to 51 frames per second at 1080p and 36 frames per second at 1440 — that’s some solid performance for such a new, graphically-intense game. The gains over the Arc launch are even more impressive.

Forspoken is Square Enix’s new magical melee combat title. It looks gorgeous… if you have the power to run its detailed graphics and whiz-bang effects. Forspoken has already earned a reputation as a resource hog even on high-end gaming PCs, and the Arc A770 isn’t a high-end card. But to Intel’s credit, the day one driver release did manage to boost 1 percent lows by a solid ten percent, even if it didn’t do much for the average FPS. At 1080p, the game runs above 60 fps on high settings — not bad!

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