SPARKLE Intel Arc A770 ROC LUNA OC Edition Hands-On Test

The Intel Arc discrete GPU has been available in the market for quite a while now and in terms of specs, it’s generally slightly lower in price than its Nvidia counterpart, the RTX 3060 Ti. Is the Intel Arc A770 discrete GPU comparable to the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti nowadays? That’s a question many creators have already answered, but we’ll provide our take on this topic. In this test, we’ll be taking a quick look at the SPARKLE Intel Arc A770 ROC LUNA OC Edition, one of the few Intel Arc A770 GPUs that is available locally.

Specs

Unboxing

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The packaging in which the A770 ROC LUNA ships is probably the A770 GPU packaging that has the most Intel look compared to the others we’ve seen so far. On the box, you’ll find the basic information about the GPU i.e. the design, specifications, and features.

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Design-wise, the A770 ROC LUNA looks like a generic dual-fan cooler graphics card at first glance but they do ship in two different colors: white and black. While it’s equipped with a seemingly decent dual-fan cooler, Sparkle never really mentioned anything about the cooler on its official product page.

The A770 ROC LUNA requires at least a 650W power supply with 2 x PCIe 8-pin connectors and has a rated TBP of 225W.

The display output is the standard 3 x DisplayPort 2.0 and 1 x HDMI 2.0b.

Test System

So, let’s start this off with some benchmark numbers on the creative work tasks. In the Blender test using splash art by Nicole Morena, the Intel Arc A770 with its OneAPI takes about 18 seconds to render the image, while the Nvidia card, using CUDA and OptiX, takes only 13 seconds.

This is expected since Blender and Nvidia work well together. For other applications like Premiere Pro, which utilize GPU acceleration for effects, the overall editing process is smoother, but rendering times for a two-minute video benchmark shows no significant difference between both cards.

In Handbrake, focusing on the AV1 codec, we find that while using the SVT-AV1 codec on a CPU is slow, switching to AV1QSV on the GPU reduces encoding time from 5 minutes to just 37 seconds. Unfortunately, the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti only supports AV1 decoding, not encoding, requiring an upgrade to the RTX 40 series for AV1 encoding.

Regarding gaming, although many creators cover this aspect, our quick synthetic benchmark shows Intel Arc A770 outperforming in most tests except for Speedway. Interestingly, it performed better in the Port Royal benchmark, which relies heavily on ray tracing.

Verdict

So, is the Intel Arc A770 good? From a creator’s perspective, using it for Premiere Pro, Photoshop, OBS, and Handbrake, it’s not fully advantageous yet unless converting footage to AV1 becomes standard. For streamers, AV1 support can improve streaming quality without increasing upload speed, making it a valuable feature.

For gamers, the Intel Arc A770 can deliver respectable frame rates in raster performance, no doubt. You can still get reasonable frame rates and graphics quality for titles with ray tracing enabled using Intel’s XeSS – though, NVIDIA still dominates this part thanks to DLSS and Frame-Gen. While Intel’s XeSS does give that extra performance on supported titles, gamers might still find NVIDIA’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR more beneficial.

Ultimately, whether the Intel Arc A770 is worth the price depends on your needs, especially this SPARKLE Intel Arc A770 ROC LUNA OC Edition which is priced at RM 1658. It’s a strong option for creators who want to take advantage of the beefy 16GB worth of VRAM and AV1 encoding, which isn’t present on the RTX 3060 Ti.