Intel's budget Arc graphics card just got a little cheaper: the Intel Arc A750 (opens in new tab) went on sale last year for $289, and just four months later it has dropped to a low $249.

The price cut for the Arc A750 goes into effect today, February 1, and applies to Intel's own-brand limited edition models. The price cut is specifically for the US market, but Intel's Tom Peterson has confirmed that nearly similar price cuts will be implemented in other regions in due course.

The Arc A750 is already my marginal favorite of the two Alchemist A7 graphics cards first released last October, and its new price makes it even more attractive to gamers on a tight budget.

This graphics card is basically a 1080p graphics card, although it is quite suitable for some games at 1440p; with 28 Xe cores, it is only 4 cores short of the full Arc A770 (open in new tab), and actual gaming performance In terms of actual gaming performance, it's not far off the pace of the larger cards, with 8GB of GDDR6 memory and plenty of resolution and rendering quality as one would expect from a card of this kind at this price. It also surprisingly supports ray tracing and hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding.

The new price puts the Arc A750 in fairly close competition with AMD's less expensive RX 6600 and RX 6600 XT (open in new tab) graphics cards for value for money. At launch, the Arc A750 was an unwinnable battle. However, the price adjustment puts it on the same playing field as the RX 6600, and the two cards will go head-to-head in multiple games at 1080p and 1440p. With ray tracing enabled, Intel leads AMD.

There are a few things to consider before rushing out to buy the Arc A750 right away. One is that its power consumption is much greater than the RX 6600 and RX 6600 XT. This may honestly be the card's biggest drawback: while the RX 6600 XT consumes 168W, the Arc A750 consumes an average of 211W when running Metro Exodus three times at 4K. Also, to get the best performance from the Intel Arc A750, you must ensure that your PC parts support Resize BAR. Finally, Intel's drivers have been controversial since their release, with inconsistent performance across games, but as of today, Intel is confident that they have resolved most of the DX9 game support and the drivers are in much better shape overall.

1080p Performance

However, Intel's price adjustment means that the Arc A750 has displaced Nvidia's RTX 3060. Unlike Intel and AMD, Nvidia's affordable GPUs are not that cheap. The lowest price I found on Newegg today was $369 (opens in new tab) and was from a less familiar manufacturer called Peladn; Intel says that at the new price, the Arc A750 offers 52% more performance per dollar than the RTX 3060 but Intel calculated this from Nvidia's average price of $391 for the card, which is higher than some cards on the market.

As shown in the graph above, the RTX 3060 usually leads the Arc A750. However, considering the Arc A750's new price tag, it is not that much of a difference, as it is $120 cheaper than the cheapest RTX 3060 I could find.

Nvidia's cheapest discrete 30-series GPU available today is the RTX 3050, which Newegg (open in new tab) has on sale today for about $290, despite an MSRP of $249. This card is always the slowest of the budget GPUs available today and is hardly a match for the Arc A750. [But Intel needs to sell enough of these cards to compete with AMD and Nvidia. However, Intel needs to sell enough of these cards to compete with AMD and Nvidia. Intel's sales numbers will be only a fraction of what the Red Team and Green Team sell.

But all things considered, Intel's new $249 price tag is very compelling. While AMD's RX 6000 series is still an attractive budget option, I would welcome Intel shaving precious pennies off their entry-level GPUs.