The Intel Arc A730M rivals an RTX 3070M in benchmarks

The dedicated Intel Arc A730M graphics card will play in the same league as an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Mobile, according to the first data that comes from the tests carried out in the 3DMark benchmark.

As you know, Intel has returned to the dedicated graphics segment with Arc Alchemist twenty years after its release. Although the company continues to dominate the total number of graphics chips with those integrated into its processors, it has been falling behind in performance and technology compared to NVIDIA and AMD. Intel has the potential, talent and resources to become a consistent alternative and its return is welcome as the third major GPU manufacturer.

But the big question consumers are asking remains the same. Will it be able to compete in performance? A few months ago the first data of the desktop models were published and now we have the laptops.

Intel Arc A730M: promising results

The graph that concerns us is one of those announced for launch in laptops, the first to release the new generation of Intel, with availability in China at the end of this month. One of those laptops will be the Mechanike Dawn 16. It is a 16-inch model with 16 Gbytes of RAM, a Core i7-12700H CPU and an Intel Arc A730M with the following features:

• 24 Xe cores.
• 3,072 shaders.
• 24 cores for ray tracing.
• GPU at 1,100MHz.
• 12GB of GDDR6 memory.
• 192 bit bus.
• TGP: 80-120 watts.

The performance results of the notebook are quite good. In 3DMark Time Spy, the laptop scored 10,107 points. This places it very close to the RTX 3070 Mobile reference notebooks from NVIDIA that have a score of 10,563. In Fire Strike it had results of 23,090 points, right in the middle between an RTX 3060 and an RTX 3070.

It must be said that this type of synthetic test offers a reference value, but they do not count all of the real value of the card. In fact, the laptop reviewer has also published FPS data on some games and they are not that good. This tells us that Intel drivers still have a long way to go to extract the full potential of the hardware.

In any case, rivaling an RTX 3070M that happens to be the absolute queen of the premium mid-range in dedicated graphics, it’s a promising start and confirms that once Intel refines the drivers (a very important section in games), we will have one more alternative to choose from. It must be said to finish that the mentioned laptop has a price of “only” 1,274 dollars at the exchange rate, which indicates that Intel’s prices are also competitive. To be continue…