If you’re looking for a great graphics card for 1080p gaming, three GPUs come to mind: the RTX 3060, the RX 6600 and the Arc A770. The latter is the most fascinating, in my opinion, as it’s seriously faster than its rivals in many games and comes with a better upscaler than AMD’s FSR in XeSS.
Today you can pick up this GPU for just £266 thanks to an Amazon UK Lightning Deal on a graphics card that comes from Amazon US – with no extra import or shipping fees. That compares favourably to the £320 that the next-cheapest A770 GPU costs, especially when you consider this is the better 16GB variant with a factory overclock!
The Arc A770 is a great graphics card, as I mentioned in the intro, but it does have its limitations. Specifically, it’s not worth considering at all if you don’t have Resizeable BAR support built into your motherboard, as the card is monumentally slow without this feature. Most motherboards made in the last five years do support ReBAR, but it’s worth checking before you pull the trigger.
Similarly, people that play mostly older games may want to give the A770 a miss. DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 titles, of which a small but significant number still exist in the annals of Steam’s most-played games, run far slower on Arc graphics cards than they do on Nvidia and AMD alternatives. These games aren’t unplayable, by any means, and performance has improved since most reviews were published with several major driver updates, but Arc runs best in games that use the more modern DirectX 12 or Vulkan graphics APIs.
That means that the Arc A770 is best used with a modern system and to play more recent games, where it does outstandingly well: great performance in rasterised (non-RT) games, plus better RT performance than even higher-tier AMD cards, plus a better image reconstruction method than AMD’s FSR in XeSS. XeSS is also the least supported upscaler, but mods do exist to add it to many games that support only DLSS or FSR, for what it’s worth.
If I was in the market for a new graphics card and I couldn’t stretch to a current-gen RTX 40-series or RX 7000-series GPU, the Arc A770 is the one I’d pick – especially at this extremely low price.
