Synthetic benchmarks:
Our first series of tests will be dedicated to synthetic benchmarks. These are often used for overclocking competitions but are also very interesting to compare different GPUs. So we will focus on the 3DMark benchmarks. We will test the following benchmarks:
- Fire Strike (1080p)
- Fire Strike Ultra (2160p)
- Time Spy (1440p)
- Time Spy Extreme (2160p)
- DirectX Raytracing
- Intel XeSS
- Mesh Shader
3DMark Fire Strike and Fire Strike Ultra :
Let’s start with 3DMark Fire Strike, which is one of the most used benchmarks today. It consists of two graphics tests, a CPU test and a fourth test that combines GPU and CPU. Don’t forget to deactivate the demo which doesn’t bring anything in the final score and prolongs the benchmark duration (unnecessarily). The version used for these tests is of course the latest one 
The first benchmark we have done with these Intel ARC graphics cards and it is rather a good start since the A770 version is in third place just behind the RX 6700 XT. The A750 version also does very well and leaves the RTX 3060 EX far behind.
The same is true under Fire Strike Ultra, even if our A770 falls back one place to a few points behind the RTX 3060 Ti. These two first benchmarks are very encouraging for the future.
3DMark Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme:
The second test is 3DMark Time Spy. Although this one is done in 1440p, it has the particularity of using DirectX 12. It consists of two graphical tests and a CPU test. As for Fire Strike, don’t forget to disable the demo. These two first benchmarks are proposed by UL Benchmark.
The performance obtained in Time Spy is often representative of what we will get in games. Here, we can see that our A770 is almost on the verge of taking first place, which is very surprising! The A750 version is also doing very well. Should we expect the same results in gaming, it seems unlikely to me in view of Intel’s announcements that very often oppose it to the RTX 3060.
Under 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, our two samples of the day came in second and third place. We can’t wait to find out the overclocking potential of these two cards because they seem very interesting for 3D.
3DMark DirectX Raytracing:
UL Benchmarks has added a new test to its series of benchmarks to measure Ray Tracing performance. The idea will be to use the 3DMark DirectX Raytracing test to compare the performance of Ray Tracing hardware dedicated to AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards but now also to Intel!
The 3DMark DirectX Raytracing test is designed to make Ray Tracing the limiting factor. Instead of relying on traditional rendering, the entire scene is traced and drawn in one pass. The test result will depend entirely on the performance of the Ray Tracing. It will be easy to measure and compare the performance of the different cards between them.
This benchmark has always been dominated by NVIDIA cards and we continue to surprise with our two Intel cards that, once again, are on the podium.
3DMark Intel XeSS
UL Benchmarks in collaboration with Intel will add this new benchmark to the 3DMark suite. We had early access to this new test for our testing. This Intel XeSS test is designed to evaluate and compare the performance and image quality of XeSS (Xe Super Sampling). There are four XeSS modes to choose from: Ultra Quality, Quality, Balanced and Performance. The 3DMark inspection tool helps you compare image quality with a side-by-side view of XeSS rendering and native resolution rendering. You need a graphics card that supports Intel XeSS to run this test.
So we’ll have two scores, a FPS number with XeSS disabled and then on the right with XeSS enabled. The mode chosen is “Ultra Quality” which is actually the default mode for the benchmark.
In this new benchmark, all graphics cards without exception benefit from XeSS, but it is Intel that has the best gain. ARC models see a gain of 50% while NVIDIA and AMD models see a gain of about 35%.
3DMark Mesh Shader:
Here is the new test we added to the synthetic benchmarks: Mesh Shader. We added it because it is managed by the RDNA 2 architecture of AMD and therefore our RX 6000. It allows us to analyze the performance level of GPUs concerning this feature. As a reminder, it allows to exploit more complex calculations at the geometry level, in a more flexible way, for each meshlet . The displayed result is the one with the Mesh Shaders active.
Well, as we conclude this first series of synthetic tests, we are bluffed by the performance of our ARC A750 and our ARC A770. These results put us in doubt about the gaming performance. What if Intel had bluffed us by offering cards that were much more powerful than expected?
