It was just over 10 months since the launch of the Intel Arc A750, which came to market together with the A770 model marking a milestone in this still current first generation of dedicated graphics adapters from Intel. This generation, Alchemist, has been talked about for a long time since its announcement, two years and two days ago, and it has generally been shown that the technology company still has a lot of work to do before it can match the two big competitors in the market, AMD and NVIDIA.

A day before the commercialization of both models, Intel published the first version of its drivers, which confirmed to us that its arrival is imminent. Now, as we told you back then, in fact, his support was still half-bakedIn other words, since the Intel Arc A750 and A 770 could be used with this controller, problems were to be expected. Not surprisingly, Intel already at that time expected that the next version of the driver would come with many improvements.

One of the problems that generally plagued Intel Arc graphics cards was it was poor support for old APIs with DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 as the main reference of this issue. The first good news in this regard for Intel Arc A750 owners came at the end of last year with an update that led to a 79% improvement in DirectX 9-based titles, which was achieved thanks to the use of the D3D9On12 Solution that we explain here.

After covering this debt, it was expected to improve DirectX 11 support, a much newer version and therefore more present in relatively new titles. And yes, we can start talking about it in the past tense, because according to the company itself, the new drivers are getting better Intel Arc A750 performance increased by 19% in DirectX 11 based titles. Of course, this support is not universal, but it is based on a whitelist of games that Intel plans to update frequently. However, users who wish to do so can try to manually enable DirectX 11 in games that are not yet included, as Intel does not change them, but certifies that they work correctly.

The improvement according to the technology that comes with the 31.0.101.4644 WHQL drivers translates into a 19% higher frame rate on average and 20% smoother frame rendering on average, for titles where the improvement is much more modest, such as the case of Destiny 2 with an increase by 5%, to the really notable cases like Overwatch 2, in which we find a 45% increase in the bottom 1% of cadres (99th percentile).

With this improvement, more than remarkable, Intel consolidates the position of the Intel Arc A750 as an interesting alternative to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, thanks to a slightly lower price than the NVIDIA model. Even more so considering that following the same model as the green giant, Intel often releases Game On updates, its drivers with specific improved support for certain games in which its scaling technology, XeSS, provides great performance improvements.

Intel PresentMon

Along with improving Intel Arc A750 performance with new drivers, Intel also announced PresentMon, the long-awaited refresh of its GPU performance monitor which, in addition, and as you can see in the picture above, is also compatible with graphics adapters of other brands, not only those from Intel. It’s very simple to install and use (though when installing, keep in mind that it’s not digitally signed, at least the current version, so Windows won’t allow it initially) and the truth is that it provides a lot of useful information in real time. P

From the data displayed in the PresentMon overlay of particular interest is the so-called “GPU Busy”a new metric that will indicate the activity time of the GPU, which will help us check, among other things, if we are not suffering from any bottleneck, for example, if the times that the CPU takes to perform certain tasks cause a halt, during which the graphics chip is inactive.

PresentMon is compatible with DX9/11/12 and Vulkan, and it can be configured through its graphical interface, but it can also be used via the command line. It’s also completely free, so downloading and trying it out is still a good idea, especially if you want to know how your graphics are performing while playing.