[0:00]I first took a look at the Arc A770 a little over a year ago. And at that time the only way I could play any PCVR games using it with my Quest 2 was by using a third-party application called Virtual Desktop. While Virtual Desktop allowed me to play some of my VR games, it did not allow me to play all of my VR games, however. It worked fine with my Oculus/Meta games, but at that time none of my Steam games would run. Well, since then, Intel has made a lot of progress with their drivers when it comes to playing flat games, so I decided it was high time I gave the A770 another look when it comes to playing VR. The very first thing I wanted to try was Quest Link because number one, it didn't work last time. And second, when I do my GPU VR performance videos, I like to use a Link cable with my Quest headset because that way it removes any potential issues that may arise from playing PCVR wirelessly, and it gives us the best picture of what that GPU is capable of when it comes to running VR games. Well, as soon as I loaded up the Meta Quest app on my test PC, I see this red banner at the top saying, Your system's graphics card is incompatible with the Rift system software. Learn More. This was a pretty good indicator to me that Quest Link still wasn't going to be working, but I wanted to give it a try anyway. And sure enough, when I jumped into my headset, my PC didn't even show up in the Quest Link menu. Next up, I wanted to try Steam Link. So, I fired up Steam and launched Steam Link on my Quest 3, and as it was starting up, it was unable to connect to my PC. I then checked my PC, and I see this message from SteamVR. So, it appears the A770 is not supported by Steam Link either at this time. Finally, I went to Virtual Desktop because last time I tested the A770, it had worked. And once again, Giga Odin, thank you! You're doing God's work, my friend. The very first game I wanted to test was Half-Life: Alyx, because when I tested the A770 a year ago, I couldn't get the game to run at all. Well, it seems that the work Intel's driver team has been doing is paying off because this time around, I was able to play Alyx on the A770. Now, for those who haven't seen my VR performance videos before, I'm a bit of what you would call a graphics snob. I always prioritize sharp, clear visuals over frame rate, so there's definitely going to be times in this video where I could have gone with a higher refresh rate than I did, but chose to increase the resolution or the game's quality settings instead. As for Half-Life: Alyx, I ended up setting the refresh rate to 72 Hz using Virtual Desktop's medium graphics quality setting, which according to info I found on Virtual Desktop's Discord server, uses a render resolution of 4032 x 2112. In Half-Life: Alyx, I set the performance option to the medium fidelity preset and this gave us pretty good performance overall. As I was going around exploring and looting, the A770 had no problem maintaining 72 FPS. However, when I got in fights with NPCs, the frame rate would drop down into the 60s, which did feel a little bit choppy, but at the same time, was okay enough to not completely kill the experience. The worst performance I saw was when solving holographic puzzles and using the Combine Fabricators, where you upgrade your weapons. The frame rate during these moments would drop way down into the 40s and even into the 30s. You can still complete the puzzles and upgrade your guns just fine at those frame rates, but it was always nice to be done with them and have the frame rate come back up to our target again. This certainly was not the best experience I've ever had playing Half-Life: Alyx. But when you consider the A770 isn't officially supported by Meta, and more than likely Intel hasn't optimized their drivers for Half-Life: Alyx either, I feel you're actually getting a decent game experience. And for anyone that's into VR, Half-Life: Alyx is one of those games you really don't want to miss out on. Another game I was unable to test last time because I only own it on Steam, and none of my Steam games would work, is Pavlov. Pavlov arguably has the dumbest bots of any VR shooter out there, but it's definitely the best-looking VR shooter available right now. And the A770 ran Pavlov at 72 Hz using Virtual Desktop's high graphics quality setting, the game's textures and effects set to high, and anti-aliasing set to low. For the most part, the frame rate stayed pretty close to our target of 72 FPS at these settings, and gameplay felt fast and smooth. But as you can see, when engaging with enemies, the frame rate did drop into the mid to high 60s. I can't say I really noticed this all that much though, as I was playing. I did notice things get a little choppy occasionally, but overall, the game played nicely and the bots generously offered themselves up for the sake of the content by marching steadily forward into my virtual bullets.
[5:29]For all my testing, I'm using a Quest 3, along with the 16 GB Limited Edition Arc A770 from Intel themselves, using the 31.0.101.5382 driver. Paired up with it in my test PC is the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, 32 GB (2x16GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3600MHz CL16 RAM, and as is recommended for Intel's Arc series graphics cards, Resizable BAR was enabled. The next game I decided to throw at the A770 was Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. Normally, I try to set the refresh rate and the render resolution where I can at least hit 72 FPS in this training flight over Sedona, Arizona. But as you can see, I would have needed to set Virtual Desktop's graphics quality to low, or maybe even potato, in order to hit that. At medium, the visuals still look pretty good, but the frame rate never made it out of the 30s. For anyone that's big into playing Flight Simulator in VR though, I think you're used to frame rates like this. From stuff I've seen, most VR pilots out there dial their settings in to get the best visuals they can while hitting frame rates in this range. The thing that kind of surprised me though, is how little our FPS dropped when I switched over to New York City. I was expecting it to be a total slideshow after the 36-ish FPS I was getting in the Sedona, Arizona flight. But on average, it only decreased by around 3 FPS, which was way better than I was expecting to see. Now, you may have noticed my 5 GHz Wi-Fi speed fluctuated quite a bit on this one, and you're going to see more of the same in this next one. While testing every game other than these two, I was downstairs in the same room as my router, which is why my Wi-Fi connection speed on everything else is like 1200 megabits per second. For this one and Flight Simulator, I was upstairs sitting next to my test PC, so I could plug in an Xbox controller to fly and drive with it. Anyway, this is Assetto Corsa Competizione, and once again, I decided to go with 72 Hz for our refresh rate and set Virtual Desktop's graphics quality to medium. In ACC's graphics settings, I used the VR high preset, and this is the performance we got. The frame rate did briefly dip below 72 on a few occasions, but most of the time we had a rock-solid 72 FPS and pretty good performance overall. Now if I could only say the same thing about my driving.
[8:03]Taking a break for a bit from the 72 Hz club, we have Red Matter 2. Which the A770 was able to run at 90 Hz using Virtual Desktop's Ultra graphics quality setting. Which is a render resolution of 5376 x 2784. As for the in-game settings, I left the resolution scale at 1.0 and turned both indirect and dynamic shadows on. These settings had the game looking super sharp and crisp in the headset, and at 90 FPS, the game played very smooth. I took the A770 to all my usual stress test areas, and the only time I was able to get the frame rate to noticeably drop below 90 was when I dropped a flare on this desk and then fired up my laser scanning tool, forcing the GPU to render the entire scene, along with these dynamic lighting elements and their reflections. So, a very respectable result for the A770 in this one. Another game the A770 was able to run at 90 Hz at Virtual Desktop's Ultra graphics quality setting was The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. I was also able to set the game's pixel density to 110% and all the other graphics quality settings to Ultra, except for anti-aliasing, which I turned off. This game is a lot of fun, and with the settings this high, it looks fantastic! One thing I noticed, which I'm not sure if it's a Virtual Desktop thing, or just the A770 handling it better than other GPUs, is I didn't get the FPS drops when fighting with the walkers or other survivors like I have in other GPU reviews. In my other videos, I've always used Quest Link, and I've also always gotten pretty significant frame drops when fighting enemies in this game. Not seeing those same kind of frame drops using Virtual Desktop, now has me wondering if there's something with Quest Link that is causing those frame drops, rather than it having anything to do with the GPU itself.
[10:08]The last game I was able to get to run at 90 Hz was Breachers. If you're not familiar with it, it's a tactical shooter very similar to Rainbow Six Siege. Having been able to use Virtual Desktop's Ultra graphics quality setting on Red Matter 2 and The Walking Dead, I first tried this game at Ultra as well. But in the end, I had to lower it to high to keep us at 90 FPS. As for the graphic settings in the game, there's not a lot of them, but I set bloom to high, turned on the environmental effects, and had anti-aliasing at 4x. As you can see, we had a very solid 90 FPS at these settings. I did try turning anti-aliasing up one more notch to 8x, but that absolutely killed our frame rate, so we had to stick with 4x. This left me curious though, as to how much performance headroom we still had. So, just for fun, I left the game at these settings and went up to 120 Hz to see what would happen, and here's what we got. The A770 wasn't able to maintain a constant 120 FPS at these settings, but it did keep us above 100 FPS. So, for someone looking for 120 FPS in Breachers with the A770, they could certainly do it, so long as they use the right mix of settings. As for a game the A770 was able to run at 120 Hz on Virtual Desktop's Ultra graphics quality setting, we have Beat Saber. Once again, I did have to turn anti-aliasing off to achieve this, but when the resolution is cranked this high, you really don't need anti-aliasing. As for the other settings in Beat Saber, you can see those on-screen now. These settings did seem to push the A770 pretty close to its limits, as if you watch Virtual Desktop's FPS counter here, it did drop down below 120 FPS fairly regularly. That being said, the game ran pretty smooth, which was nice to see since it was being wirelessly streamed from my PC to my Quest 3. Beat Saber is one of those games where you need as little latency and input lag as possible. And while playing it wirelessly does introduce a little bit of latency, I was able to play on Expert, and my daughter on Expert Plus. Yeah, she's significantly better than me at this game. But the point is, both of us were able to hit the blocks pretty consistently. The one other game I ran at 120 Hz with the A770 was Contractors. And just like with Beat Saber, I was able to use Virtual Desktop's Ultra graphics quality setting and set all the in-game graphic settings to Ultra as well. Except anti-aliasing once again, which I left at medium. Like Beat Saber, this pushed the A770 right to the edge, and our frame rate did frequently drop below 120. However, it rarely dipped much lower than 110 FPS, so the vast majority of the time, the game felt fast and smooth to me. In order to run Blade and Sorcery at Virtual Desktop's high graphics quality setting, I had to lower the refresh rate all the way down to 72 Hz again. Lowering the refresh rate to this point allowed me to keep the game settings quite high, but I did have to turn post-processing off because with it on, I got these crazy flashing lights you see here. Even with post-processing turned off though, I still had some weird visual artifacts going on where you could see some of the mesh that makes up the character models and the models of other objects in the game. I restarted the game and my computer a couple of times to see if that would fix this, but this visual issue did not go away. It didn't stop me from playing and testing the game though. Performance-wise, things were really good overall. That is, until I got to this area and was fighting a bunch of NPCs all at once. Here the frame rate dropped down into the 50s a few times, which did feel pretty choppy. But it was always short-lived enough that I was okay keeping settings where they were.
[14:11]Lone Echo 2 is one of the few games I had to run using Virtual Desktop's medium graphics quality setting to be able to keep the game looking decent and running at a consistent 72 FPS in most areas of the game. There are some areas of this game that have some volumetric effects going on, and those did tax the A770 a bit more and dropped our frame rate into the 60s. So, I probably should have disabled volumetric and maybe even use the game's low quality preset instead of medium. But this was one of those tough calls for me because I want to keep the settings as high as possible, and since the A770 had no problem maintaining our target frame rate in most other areas of the game, I decided to just go with these settings, let you guys see how the GPU performs and let you make up your mind from there. Keeping our refresh rate at 72 Hz, but bumping Virtual Desktop's graphics quality setting up to high, I next tested Ghosts of Tabor. In GOT's graphics settings, I used the medium overall quality preset, but then lowered the resolution quality from 42% to 40% to try and help keep our frame rate a little more consistent. Depending on where you are, what you're looking at, and what you're doing in this game, the frame rate can vary quite a bit, no matter what graphics card you're using. And this test with the A770 was right in line with what I've seen from the few other GPUs I've tested this game with. At times, the frame rate was solid, but at other times it dropped down into the 50s and 60s. And the thing that's weird about it to me is these frame rate drops seem to happen more or less randomly. The overall scene being rendered will be pretty much the same, but the frame rate is fine when looking one direction, and then drops out when you look the other way. Had I not experienced the same behavior with other more powerful GPUs, I might have blamed this on the A770 and/or Intel's drivers. But this seems to me like it's the devs that have some work to do to better optimize their game. The last game in our lineup is Into the Radius, and like the majority of the games I tested, to keep the visuals sharp like I like them, I had to once again go with a refresh rate of 72 Hz and use Virtual Desktop's high graphics quality setting. In the game settings, I used the medium graphics quality preset, and as you can see, the A770 fared really well at these settings in this game. There was the occasional dip below our target of 72 FPS, but overall, the performance was good, and the visuals looked sharp. While it is nice to see you can use the Arc A770 to play PCVR, my conclusion this time around is still the same as it was a year ago. If you're looking at the Arc A770 specifically to play VR, I would not recommend it, especially if you're going to be using it with a Quest headset. It's not officially supported by Meta, and I feel like Intel's drivers could use some optimization in at least half the games I tested here, if not all of them. And with Intel's Arc GPUs having such a small user base when you compare it to Nvidia and AMD, and VR being a fairly small niche segment of the overall gaming industry, I don't see Intel or Meta doing much of anything to improve the VR performance of Arc GPUs. If you're strictly looking for a GPU to play PCVR, as someone who has pretty extensively tested GPUs from all the major manufacturers in VR, I feel you'll be best off going with AMD or Nvidia. AMD GPUs do require you to do some tinkering to get your VR games to run optimally, however. So, if that's not something you want to mess with, and you're looking for the least amount of hassle, in my experience, Nvidia is undeniably the best choice for PCVR as of right now.
