Intel has revitalized the midrange graphics card market with the company’s latest Arc A770 which will soon come under the category of best graphics cards. The range begins at $329 and the Arc Alchemist graphics card brings GeForce RTX 3060-like performance along with Resizable BAR (ReBAR) enabled. Without ReBAR or the same technology like Smart Access Memory (SAM), it is a different story. 

With Arc, Intel advises the consumers to check if their systems support ReBAR or SAM. The chipmaker in fact published it on its website. ReBAR is not compulsory to have but is recommended since the chipmaker built its graphics cards and drivers around ReBAR. It can be assumed that Arc graphics card goes through a performance penalty on systems which is devoid of ReBAR support. Arc A770 has been examined with disabled ReBAR, and the result itself shows the truth.  

Without ReBAR, the Arc A770’s performance on average went up to 77% at 1080p (1920x1080), 76% at 1440p (2560x1440), and 80% at 4K (3840x2160). Those Arc owners who do not possess a system with ReBAR are losing a quarter of the performance from their graphics cards. Other offerings of Intel like A750 and A380 will also undergo performance losses. However, we do not know to what extent. 

The games suffered from stutters and were unplayable without ReBAR. On top of that, the lack of ReBAR impacted the Arc A770 across 25 titles, so it is not only AMD or Nvidia-specific titles. 

The speed of the expansion slot has also been tested whether it has an impact on Arc A770’s performance or not. The Arc A770 comes with a conventional PCIe 4.0 x16 interface. The tests also revealed that PCIe 3.0 is enough for Arc A770 as long as ReBAR is enabled. Also, a performance difference of up to 2% has been observed between PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0, thus ReBAR support is more significant than the expansion slot. 

Only Intel 10th Generation Comet Lake, 11th Generation Rocket Lake, and 12th Generation Alder Lake processors support the feature of ReBAR. For AMD, SAM support is only there on Ryzen 3000 Zen 2 chips and newer. Therefore, while the performance of Arc looks attractive and is reasonable, its requirements lock out users with older systems. Arc also demands Windows 10 20H2 or Windows 11 as the operating system, so Windows 7 users, who are reluctant to upgrade, are also not in the picture. 

The Arc A770 will hit the retail market on October 12, starting at $329. If in case you are planning to upgrade to Arc for gaming, make sure your system supports ReBAR or SAM. If not, then you can choose Radeon RX 6650 XT for $285 or even GeForce RTX 3060 for $369.