Nvidia’s RTX 4060 Ti and AMD’s RX 7600 highlight one thing: Intel’s $200 Arc A750 GPU is the best budget GPU by far

Is Nvidia’s new RTX 4060 Ti an actual disaster or just a bit disappointing? That’s debatable. But one thing is for sure. At $400, it’s still whole console money for a pretty low end GPU. What is a gamer on a tight budget to do?

Buy an Intel Arc A750 graphics card, that’s what. Yes, really. Because it’s now available for just $200. That’s half the price of the 4060 Ti, but it’s a lot more than half of the graphics card.

It’s also way cheaper than the new $300 AMD RX 7600. And get this. Sometimes it’s actually faster than the RX 7600. On average, for standard raster games with no ray tracing enabled, the RX 7600 is about 10% faster than the A750 at 1440p. But if you enable ray-tracing the A750 is actually faster.

It’s very hard to see what the extra $100 is buying you with the AMD board. How about the Nvidia comparison? For standard raster performance at 1440p, the RTX 4060 Ti is in the region of 60% faster. That sounds like a lot. And it is. But the RTX 4060 Ti is also not only 100% more money, but also, you know, it’s $400. That’s $400 an awful lot of people simply don’t have.

Put another way, where the RTX 4060 Ti is returning, say, 80 fps, which is about what it does deliver on average in standard raster games without ray-tracing enabled, the A750 will give you about 50 fps.

Can you feel the difference between 50 fps and 80 fps? A bit. But it’s not like we’re talking 50 fps versus 200 fps. Basically, it’s not like the RTX 4060 Ti is serving up a completely different experience.

OK, turn on ray tracing and the 4060 Ti will actually be about twice as fast at 1440p. And it will sometimes be playable where the A750 usually won’t with ray-tracing enabled and maxed out textures at 1440p.

And then there’s the added benefits of DLSS and Frame Generation with the RTX 4060 Ti. Intel has decent scaling tech in XeSS, but lacks the fancy frame interpolation tech. How much value do you put on all that? It’s hard to say definitively.

The RTX 4060 Ti is double the money, but it ain’t twice the gaming experience. (Image credit: Future)

At worst, the A750 is about half as good as the RTX 4060 Ti for half the money.

But the overarching point is that, at worst, the A750 is about half as good as the RTX 4060 Ti for half the money. But most of time and by most measures it’s a lot better than that and thus far better value for money and likewise just plain more accessible at $200.

Moreover, sometimes the comparative numbers are irrelevant, especially on a limited budget. Who cares how good the RTX 4060 Ti is if $400 is double what you can afford. More important is the fact that the A750 will average 60 fps at 1440p Ultra settings in a demanding game like Metro Exodus. That’s really not a bad budget experience, is it?

In fact, at 1440p ultra without ray tracing in our testing during the RX 7600 review, the lowest frame rate the A750 returned was 48 fps. That’s very playable in a budget context. Even better, Intel’s driver quality just keeps on improving and there’s a good chance those numbers will only get better.

The final benefit of the $200 price tag is that you don’t have to feel ripped off by virtue of having just 8GB of VRAM. Having just 8GB is fine for $200 but feels awfully stingy at $400.

So, yeah, Intel’s time has finally come in the GPU market. The Intel Arc A750 is a genuinely great buy for $200 and will deliver a solid gaming experience. It’s undoubtedly the best GPU you can currently buy for a budget build.

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