We Tested 250 Games on an Intel Arc GPU: How Did It Go? (2024)

We have tested almost every game in our collection on an Intel Arc GPU to determine how many titles work on Intel's discrete graphics architecture and what kind of experience you can expect. Do all of the 250 games we played launch? Do they all play without major graphical issues? Is Arc capable of delivering playable performance in all these titles? We have gathered some great data to explore.

For this review we've tested the Intel Arc A770 16GB – currently Intel's fastest graphics card – in 250 games. We actually own slightly more than 250 games, and of course, "owning" is a questionable terms to use on digital platforms, but we went with a round number of titles representing the vast majority of our game library.

This includes games from as far back as the early 2000s, alongside many more from the last decade and a half of PC releases. With this sample size, we can really dig in and see what Arc can do across a wide range of games from different eras, using different game engines, and with varying levels of graphical fidelity.

Every game in this benchmark review has been tested using driver version 31.0.101.5592, which was the most recent driver available when we began testing. Intel updates their drivers regularly, so as of writing, the latest version is 32.0.101.5762. However, none of the issues described in this article have been resolved in that driver, as far as we are aware. We also didn't contact Intel about any of these issues ahead of time, because most people actually buying an Arc GPU don't have a hotline to call Intel for specific game fixes or tips on how to resolve problems.

The Arc A770 was slotted into my personal gaming rig, which includes a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and 32GB of DDR5-6,000 CL30 memory running the latest version of Windows 11. We targeted a 1440p resolution for all the testing, a common resolution for this tier of GPU, with HDR enabled.

We also looked for any obvious visual artifacts. This includes missing textures or assets, visual glitches like shadow flickering, or any other major problems.

When testing all of these games, we looked for each game to pass a set of criteria while also briefly examining performance and in-game settings. We looked for games to pass three tiers of "launching" – the game launching to the main menu, the game launching into a level or gameplay, and the game launching without requiring any tweaks. For example, if a title did launch to the menu but crashed when attempting to load a level, that would mean a pass for launching, but a fail for loading into the game.

Finally, we wanted to make sure each game is actually playable from a performance perspective. For most games, this meant achieving 40 FPS at a minimum. The second tier of this was assessing whether a consistent 60 FPS was possible at a minimum, without dips below this, even using the lowest settings. If a game could be played at a minimum of 60 FPS using low settings, that would pass both criteria, but if only 45 FPS is achieved in the tested area, we deemed it playable without reaching a consistent 60 FPS.

As you might expect, given the number of games we reviewed, we didn't play every game for hours at a time, and the goal of this review was not an in-depth benchmark comparison to other GPUs. That just wasn't feasible. This means that any graphical or performance issues that arise only from hours of play wouldn't have been caught, nor would in-game crashes that require reaching specific sections of the game or playing for certain amounts of time. When issues did arise, we allocated 5 to 10 minutes to try and sort out the problem; if the game couldn't be fixed quickly, it was deemed a fail.

Games That Work Really Well on Intel Arc

The good news is that the vast majority of the time, the Intel Arc A770 plays games without any issues. In 218 out of the 250 games tested, Arc passed with flying colors: this means a flawless launch with no graphical artifacts and playable frame rates. We think this is a pretty good result given the relative newness of this GPU and the depth of our games library, which includes many titles released over a long period of time.

The games that work on Arc aren't skewed to any era either. Most titles from this year and last year work well on the A770. For example, Horizon Forbidden West requires playing using low settings, but a consistent 60 FPS experience is possible. This is also the case with Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth using the Highest settings, Resident Evil 4 using max settings without ray tracing, Hogwarts Legacy using High settings with XeSS, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor on medium settings.

The further back we go in release date, generally we see better results from Arc, as you would expect given the performance requirements of older games. Titles from five years ago like Gears 5 can be run successfully on Ultra settings, as can A Plague Tale: Innocence and even Metro Exodus.

Looking back 10 years ago, Arc is very capable of a high-refresh experience using ultra settings. This is the case in the areas we tested in Dragon Age: Inquisition, Far Cry 4, and Battlefield 4 – most offered 90 to 100 FPS using the absolute highest settings with no issues.

We were also impressed with the general compatibility of games that are very old by modern standards. If you really want to go back and play The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, or Portal – again, all those titles worked just fine and delivered hundreds of FPS.

You are much more likely to run into issues with the way the games are made, rather than issues with Arc GPU compatibility. It's pretty common to need to use workarounds or hacks to get support for modern conveniences like widescreen monitors or uncapped frame rates. 25 of the titles in our library had hard-coded frame rate limits, and several more had broken physics or other problems at high FPS. One was even capped at 30 FPS, which is a disgrace.

Breaking down the results by the settings used to achieve over 60 FPS in the areas we tested, the vast majority of titles could be played using maximum or ultra settings. 86 titles used the absolute highest settings the game had to offer, 54 used the ultra preset, and 11 used very high without upscaling. Another 11 games could be run on at least Very High with some form of upscaling. An additional 13 titles had no settings as they were lightweight or indie titles. So in total, that meant 175 games on Intel Arc ran perfectly fine and at pretty decent quality settings.

Sixteen titles could then be run on High settings, which were typically one or two steps down from max settings, 11 with High settings and upscaling, and 7 games were competitive titles that we chose to run on lower settings to achieve higher frame rates on purpose. That's 209 titles running on Arc without having to resort to the lower presets.

Rounding things out were the 8 titles that didn't run especially well but were playable on lower quality settings. On medium settings, these were Halo Infinite, Mafia: Definitive Edition, Pacific Drive, Ghost Recon Wildlands, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and A Plague Tale: Requiem. Low settings were required for Immortals of Aveum and Horizon Forbidden West. The last title listed as 'Other' is Battlefield 2042, which we couldn't test properly due to the complete lack of anyone playing this game.

We were also pleased to see that 115 of the games we tested ran at (taking a general look at the frame rate) 90 FPS or higher in the area we tested or the built-in benchmark. It was more common across our library for a game to run at a high frame rate than near 60 FPS, though of course, many titles are older and expected to run well on this sort of GPU.

There's good news here for gamers who typically stick to popular games and, in particular, popular multiplayer games. All of the games that we played that could be categorized this way worked flawlessly and generally with decent levels of performance. This includes Call of Duty: Warzone, Fortnite, Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends, Grand Theft Auto V, Overwatch 2, Rocket League, PUBG, and Stardew Valley. Now some of these games probably didn't run as well as we expected; we'd put GTA V in that category and probably Call of Duty: Warzone as well – but in both instances with setting tweaks you can achieve a good experience.

Unfortunately, though, in 10 of these games that did work and delivered playable frame rates, we reported noticeable frame pacing issues or stuttering. For some of these games, this is a known issue not specific to Arc, for example, the Dead Space Remake and some of the Assassin's Creed titles. In others like Days Gone and Crysis 3, this was more surprising. Other titles had minor traversal stutter in areas people have brought up previously, such as the Star Wars Jedi games from the last few years.

Games That Don't Work Flawlessly

Out of 250 games, 218 worked anywhere from pretty well to flawlessly, but let's talk about the 32 that had issues. So first to clarify, in 12 of these titles we saw relatively minor issues that prevented the game from launching flawlessly. In all of these, the main issue was the game attempting to run on the integrated AMD GPU in our system instead of the discrete Intel Arc GPU.

These games appear to be hardcoded to prefer running on an AMD GPU over an Intel GPU, presumably to stop the game from launching on the Intel iGPU in systems with an Intel CPU and AMD GPU. In this reversed situation – AMD CPU with Intel GPU – these games get stuck and either crash or deliver horrendously low performance.

The simple solution to this is to disable the integrated graphics in our AMD CPU, which is probably a sensible choice given the 7800X3D's iGPU is not especially powerful. However, when inserting a competing Radeon GPU into our gaming rig – the Radeon RX 6650 XT – we don't need to disable the iGPU in any of these 12 games; they all run flawlessly on the first attempt, whereas on Arc you need to apply the iGPU disabling fix.

This could catch out novice users, and Intel should advise developers not to code games in this way. In particular, Alan Wake II is a newer title that has this issue, which was released after Intel's Arc GPU series.

11 of these 12 games otherwise delivered a flawless experience once the iGPU is disabled, so they should be added to the previous 218 working titles, bringing the running total up to 229 games – or 92% of our library.

The Games That Crash on Intel

Five games didn't work at all, and these are the worst case scenarios for Arc. Three titles simply crashed immediately on launch: Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, Batman Arkham City, and Sim City 4, although Sim City does launch just to a permanent black screen. Two further titles launch into the main menu but refuse to load into a level, those being Left 4 Dead 2 and Saints Row 2.

The saving grace for Arc is that we also couldn't get Avatar to load on our Radeon RX 6650 XT, suggesting in that instance, the issue is more with the game than the Arc GPU. However, for the other four games, the Radeon card had no issues, so those appear to be Arc-specific crashes.

None were fixable in a reasonable amount of time using typical workarounds like resetting the settings to default, verifying the game files, restarting the PC, or disabling the iGPU.

With that said, the crash rate for our game library, in terms of crashes specific to the Arc A770 16GB, is just 4 games out of 250, or 2% of the titles examined. We were honestly expecting more titles to flat out not work, especially after some of the early reports surrounding Arc GPU compatibility, so kudos to Intel for working hard to get the vast majority of games working.

Games with Visual Artifacts and Issues

We noticed graphical artifacts in six games. In BioShock Infinite, texture settings above Low don't work and lead to missing textures, making the Ultra preset look terrible. This is not an issue on the Radeon RX 6650 XT, which loads textures correctly in this configuration.

In Dirt Rally, we noticed glitching on water streams in the background, appearing as weird black dots. This isn't overly distracting, but it's not an artifact that the RX 6650 XT renders, suggesting it's Arc-specific.

In Ghost of Tsushima, rain doesn't render correctly using some graphical settings, particularly high settings, and this doesn't appear related to upscaling. When this artifact appears, rain looks awful. In contrast, the exact same scene using higher settings on the RX 6650 XT works just fine.

In Starfield, we noticed significant shadow flickering and artifacting along the edges of some objects, and this was universal across quality settings, high and low. This is another artifact that you don't get when playing on the RX 6650 XT in the same area with the same settings.

The final two games had issues on both Intel and AMD GPUs, suggesting the problem lies with the game rather than Intel Arc. These are Grand Theft Auto IV, a game that doesn't correctly detect the amount of VRAM and on higher quality settings just completely fails to load objects including the ground, even when forcing VRAM overrides. And The Witcher 3, which has some shadow flickering that we spotted in our test area.

In summary, two games with visual issues and four with seeming graphical compatibility issues on Intel Arc specifically. We wouldn't say that these problems are game-breaking in all instances, but they definitely lead to an uglier presentation or compromised visuals relative to the same game played on a Radeon GPU.

Games with Performance Issues

And for last we've left the games where we observed performance-related issues. The Arc A770 16GB didn't achieve 60 FPS in 11 titles, and in six of these games the experience was unplayable. However, two of these unplayable titles are Portal with RTX and Quake II with RTX – if you really wanted to play these games, you could just avoid running the RTX versions. Neither title was playable on a competing Radeon GPU either, you need to either go with a faster GPU and preferably a GeForce one that gets all the software optimization in those two titles.

Let's focus on the games that run badly but aren't necessarily unplayable first. In the area we tested, Starfield ran at less than 60 FPS using the lowest in-game settings, including XeSS Performance, which makes the game look poor. This game is playable above 60 FPS on a Radeon 6650 XT by contrast, though it still needs relatively high amounts of upscaling and low settings.

Alan Wake II also struggles to hit a consistent 60 FPS using the low preset with upscaling, although you can settle into a nice 40 to 50 FPS experience here, which is definitely playable in this game. However, like with Starfield, this game runs better on Radeon cards and is more likely to deliver a consistent 60 FPS experience.

The Last of Us Part I has been a pain point with Arc, as we previously reported to Intel that the game crashed during shader compilation. That's no longer the case, but even using the lowest in-game settings with FSR Performance, there are dips in the areas we played to below 60 FPS. Playable in this sort of game, but not ideal. Again, in contrast, the game runs much better on the RX 6650 XT to the point where you can use Quality upscaling instead of Performance while achieving better frame rates.

Another example is Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2. Using low settings with XeSS Performance, this is another game that struggles to consistently reach 60 FPS. This is a very slow-paced game that's perfectly fine to play at around 40 to 50 FPS, so you can use XeSS Quality instead of Performance for better visuals while maintaining playability. But again, the RX 6650 XT can deliver a consistent 60 FPS, still using low settings, in the same areas with better performance than Arc.

While these titles don't run well, most would probably run okay if the Arc A770 was a little bit faster. That can't be said for some of the games we played, though. Dragon's Dogma II is one example that is totally unplayable and needs significant driver work. We had to start the game again and even in the very opening area saw significant frame drops to well below 30 FPS, making the game lag hard and just feel like trash. This was using the absolute lowest possible settings, which also made the game look terrible. In contrast, we didn't see any noticeable frame rate drops or issues on the Radeon 6650 XT. You'll still have to settle for medium-level settings with upscaling, but the experience is night and day better on the competing AMD GPU.

Yakuza Like a Dragon from the outset runs at below 30 FPS with low GPU utilization on Arc, no matter whether you use the highest or lowest quality settings. There's also significant frame pacing issues, so it's not even a consistent 25 FPS; it ramps up and down as you move around, making the game feel awful to play. Again, this title runs just fine on a Radeon card and can even be enjoyed on Ultra settings. We were especially puzzled by this game running so poorly when its sequel – which is very similar to this game and even has some of the same areas – actually runs quite well.

Metro Last Light is the final title we wanted to highlight. This is a weird one where the game initially appears to run fine, but within about a minute of gameplay, performance completely falls off a cliff and delivers just 25 FPS. This makes Last Light run significantly worse than its sequel, Metro Exodus. Again, no real issues on the RX 6650 XT, which allows you to play the game at higher quality settings and higher frame rates without performance suddenly tanking for no reason.

What's less than ideal about the performance problems with some games on Arc is that generally, this affects newer games more than older games. Dragon's Dogma II was one of the unplayable games, and that was released this year. Hellblade 2, Starfield, and Alan Wake 2 were all released in the last 12 months, though would probably run fine on a more powerful Arc card. We believe Starfield was actually unplayable on Arc at launch, too, which isn't great for people that wanted to jump into that title straight away.

So here's the final breakdown of the 32 games with issues. 15 of these had more minor problems: either they launched to the iGPU and could be fixed, or they couldn't achieve a solid 60 FPS but were still playable. The other 17 games had more noticeable problems, including 11 that were totally unplayable due to launch or performance-related concerns. That resulted in between 4 and 7 percent of our game library having show-stopper problems, depending on how serious you rank the graphical issues.

What is disappointing about this is that of the 32 games that had issues on the Arc A770, just 5 had the same issues on the Radeon RX 6650 XT, and there were only three games we'd describe as completely unplayable. To be fair, we didn't test all 250 games on the Radeon card, only the ones with issues on Arc, so it's hard to say if only 5 out of 250 total games had issues. But it does point to fewer concerns on the Radeon side.

Quality of Life Concerns with Intel Arc

In addition to game testing as we did today, there are a few quality-of-life issues that Intel still needs to address with Arc GPUs. For example, their performance overlay inexplicably does not include an FPS counter. While you could use a third-party tool to get one, like Intel's own PresentMon, it would be much better to have this integrated into the built-in tool. We use Nvidia's overlay all the time to check FPS when optimizing settings, so not having that with Arc is a bit baffling.

We ran into multi-monitor problems trying to run our Alienware AW3423DW and a second monitor, the Cooler Master GP27U, at the same time, with the GP27U over HDMI. It would just run into loops of trying to wake up the monitor but failing, something that doesn't happen on GeForce or Radeon GPUs in the same system.

There's also the small point of power consumption. While not fixable with this current generation of hardware, the Arc A770 consumes more power than equivalent Radeon or GeForce cards. However, if we are talking about the hardware design, on a positive note, the Arc A770 does feature 16GB of VRAM, which allows pretty much every game to be run using maximum quality textures, even if other settings have to be dialed back, so that's a nice bonus.

The Intel Arc GPU Experience

When all is said and done, we have thoroughly enjoyed attempting to play nearly every game in our library on the Intel Arc A770. It was a bit of a crazy experiment considering all the titles we had on our library, but it ultimately provided lots of valuable insights into where Intel stands right now and what it's like to actually own and use Arc GPUs on a regular basis.

When it comes to game compatibility, you could take as many positives out of this investigation as you could negatives. We tried 250 games; 218 of them worked very well without major issues, and as many as 233 of them ended up firmly in the playable zone. That's the vast majority of our game library, spanning everything from new titles to decades-old titles, working to a reasonable degree 20 months after this GPU launched.

The downside, though, is that 5% of our library was essentially unplayable, either due to launch or performance issues. That doesn't sound like much, but most of the time these very same "unplayable" titles were perfectly playable on Intel's nearest competitor, the AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT. Intel GPUs just aren't in a position yet where game compatibility is as broad as Team Red or Team Green, even if, generally speaking, a given game is likely to work on Arc just fine.

We were expecting to find many more older titles that might have slipped through the cracks and ended up without necessary driver optimizations, but that's not the case. Most older titles work fine. It's actually more recent games that are more concerning, with issues in Alan Wake II, Starfield, and Dragon's Dogma II, the latter of which is completely unplayable.

Intel has no doubt improved from their original position of "probably don't buy this GPU unless you want to deal with early adopter issues" to "this is a viable option if the value proposition is right."

This makes it difficult to recommend Intel Arc for gamers that want to play major single-player titles close to launch. Intel has absolutely been working hard to ensure most games work on day one – and they've definitely ensured the most popular multiplayer titles work well – but they now need to prove that Arc can be as reliable as Radeon or GeForce for the newest titles.

A new architecture with much higher performance would help, but in the next 12 months, ideally, there needs to be virtually zero major game launches that are broken on Arc. Old games are basically solved, popular games are solved. If Intel can tick this last box, they'll be in a great position.

The Arc A770 and most of Intel's GPU line-up are in a difficult place competitively. The A770 16GB is available for $270, but you can pick up a Radeon RX 6650 XT for just $220 these days, or an RX 7600 for $250. There's also the GeForce RTX 4060, though that's more expensive and provides less value, hence why we used the 6650 XT throughout this comparison. Our most recent data has the A770 essentially matching these GPUs in performance on average at 1440p.

This makes the older Radeon 6650 XT and RX 7600 the better value cards from a cost-per-frame perspective, as well as the more reliable cards with better game compatibility. Intel does have the higher quality XeSS XMX upscaler on its side, as well as double the VRAM, but it's not a slam dunk by any means in that comparison. We suspect most gamers would choose the card that is more likely to work with the games they want to play than the card with 16GB of VRAM but a chance of the odd unplayable title, though we'd certainly be interested to hear your thoughts in the comments.

In this scenario, we believe Arc GPUs simply have to be cheaper than competitors. They need to be in a place where you're deciding: do I go with the cheaper card that offers 30% more performance but may struggle with the occasional day-one title, or do I go with the more expensive, slower GPU from the bigger brands that's more likely to work with every game? Right now, Intel is making it too easy to pick up a GeForce or Radeon GPU instead.

With all of that said, Intel has no doubt improved from their original position of "probably don't buy this GPU unless you want to deal with early adopter issues" to "this is a viable option if the value proposition is right." Most games work just fine on Arc. If you mostly play popular multiplayer games, Arc is a very suitable choice. The range of features and included software is respectable. It's just not the best there is at its current price. But will a new generation change that? There's a chance.

Will Arc Battlemage start from a much better position with a more solid foundation? Absolutely, and that's credit to the hard work Intel has put in to improve Arc with every update.