Nvidia is no longer the king of ray tracing in every game, with an Acer Bifrost Intel Arc A770 graphics card being a massive 231 percent quicker than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti in our Doom Eternal ray tracing test, thanks to the Acer card’s extra memory.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti only comes with 8GB of VRAM as standard, despite costing $399, while the Acer Bifrost Intel Arc A770 comes with a massive 16GB of VRAM and is in the same price bracket. VRAM has a huge impact on our Doom Eternal ray tracing benchmark, which will technically run on a graphics card with 8GB of VRAM, but suffers from stuttering and frame rate drops, making the game unplayable.
In our tests, the Acer Bifrost Intel Arc A770 averaged 189fps in Doom Eternal at Ultra Nightmare settings with ray tracing enabled, with a 99th percentile result of 130fps, making the game smoothly playable. However, the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti could only average 57fps with a 29fps 99th percentile result in the same test, as its memory was maxed out – the game stuttered heavily to the point where it was unplayable.
The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti isn’t the only new GPU to only come equipped with 8GB of VRAM at launch. The AMD Radeon RX 7600 and the GeForce RTX 4060 also have this limit, and have similarly poor results in our Doom Eternal ray tracing benchmark.
The Acer Bifrost Intel Arc A770 card is much more competitive than all these cards in a ray-traced game that needs lots of VRAM. You can see the huge jump in performance you get when you go from 8GB to 16GB of VRAM in the performance graph below.
The forthcoming GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB will probably solve this problem for Nvidia, but its price of $499 is going to put it at a serious competitive disadvantage. There won’t be a Founders Edition of the 16GB card either, and board partners aren’t sending out samples to reviewers. In short, the RTX 4060 Ti really needed to come with 16GB at launch, and at a cheaper price than $499.
The Acer Bifrost Intel Arc A770 is now one of the only 16GB Intel Arc cards available, as Intel has discontinued its own Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition cards.
We tested the Acer Bifrost Intel Arc A770 for a forthcoming review, and we’ll be sharing the rest of our findings shortly. It usually has a price of $399, but it currently costs $319 at New Egg in the US and £299 at Currys in the UK, making it substantially cheaper than the average RTX 4060 Ti graphics card.
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