Despite an unwelcome start, Intel wants to show that this time it has something to say in the graphics processing sector. The CPU giant published an official comparison in which you can see that depending on its graphics version Arc A770 is faster in ray tracing processing than RTX 3060 from NVIDIA.

As we said yesterday, Intel targeting NVIDIA instead of Radeon makes all the sense in the world, as AMD’s ray tracing support still lags far behind the green giant’s offerings. This defeats the competitor, of course, NVIDIA, which, at least until the discovery of Intel Arc graphics, showed that it was at least two generations ahead of the competition.

Intel has chosen to use dedicated hardware to handle ray tracing via DirectX Raytracing 1.0, DirectX Raytracing 1.1 and the Vulkan RayTracing API. At the hardware architecture level, each Xe core has a Thread Classification Unit (TSU) and a Ray Tracing Unit (RTU). The technology the company uses allows it to process ray tracing asynchronously, so in that sense it is closer to NVIDIA than to AMD, which processes ray tracing synchronously (depends on shaders). With this on the table, Intel has technological reasons to compare itself to NVIDIA.

If visible, graph The Arc A770 is a total of 14% faster than the RTX 3060 Based on Intel’s own test results when running games at 1080p resolution. However, one can see at least four titles where NVIDIA GPUs winwith a special mention to Hitman 3, where the RTX 3060 averaged 68fps compared to the Arc A770’s 57, and Battlefiled V, which scored 81 and 67, respectively.

The RTX 3060 has a total of 28 cores for ray tracing, while the Intel Arc A770 has not yet mentioned all its official specifications, but it is estimated to use a full-fledged ACM-G10 GPU with a total of 32. Xe cores, so taking the data exposed in this entry should have the same amount of RTU.

Another figure that Intel gives is enhancements provided by XeSSits supersampling technology aimed at competing with NVIDIA’s DLSS, while mitigating the impact of ray tracing on performance in 1440p resolution. On a general level, the improvement is noticeable, doubling the performance with Ghostwire Tokyo and Hitman 3.

With these internal tests that it has published, Intel intends to show its muscles and that it is able to contribute things in a sector that eluded it a few decades ago. With NVIDIA enjoying a clear dominant position in the industry and Radeon moving away from technology, the presence of a suitable Intel is more than necessary to create competition and benefit consumers.