ACER’s FIRST GRAPHICS CARD! Intel A770 BiFrost Review

Acer is no stranger to designing boards with graphics chips on them – but you’ll mostly find those in gaming laptops. This is their first desktop graphics card, and it’s an Intel chip! This is a bit of a rarity – not only are Acer dipping their toes in the GPU market (right as EVGA nopes out) but they’ve gone with the new kid on the block, that being Intel, as well. This is the Acer A770 16GB BiFrost OC – let’s take a closer look at it.

I’ll start with the A770 16GB part of that, which is a 32 Xe core, 2.1GHz, 225W GPU with 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM, which is a fair bit considering the competition normally offers more like 8GB at this sort of price point. Acer have pushed that 2.1GHz clock speed to 2.2GHz, and offer it with their shiny new BiFrost cooler. This is a rather interesting design as it’s half open-air card, and half blower card. The rear fan – complete with RGB lighting of course – has a 4090 style blow-through cooler which I actually quite like. The front fan is more akin to their laptop fans – apparently it’s a “5th generation AEROBLADE 3D” fan – aka a metal blower style fan that draws air in the centre and exhausts it out the large holes in the back of the card. This can be quite effective, as it gets the hot air out of your case rather than just spreading it around inside which can heatsoak your chassis and contribute to hotter CPU temperatures too. The catch is almost always sound, and I would say it’s louder than the 3060 I was testing against. Here’s a little clip of it running furmark.

Before we get into the performance results – comparing to an RTX 3060 – I need to show you Acer’s BiFrost software. Their Predator BiFrost software – which I only found through a tweet by the way Acer, please fix that – offers some overclocking and lighting controls, and a bit of monitoring too. You can tweak everything Acer offers in Intel’s driver suite, although Acer does provide profiles which I’ve tested – specifically the “Turbo” profile which sets the power limit to 235W, up from seemingly 210W on “Default”. You can switch to the user mode and drag the power limit to 252W at most though, should you want to push the envelope.

So, the performance. Sadly Intel didn’t send out a stock A770 for me to test against, but I think a similarly aftermarket design RTX 3060 should do the trick. I tested with the stock out-of-the-box performance, alongside the “Turbo” mode in Acer’s software to give you a rough idea of how this will perform. I’m testing with a Ryzen 9 7900X here, with Resizable BAR enabled, and the very latest Intel driver (and NVIDIA driver for that matter).

Starting with Hitman 3, this isn’t exactly a promising start. On generally medium settings at 1080p the 3060 runs away with it here, offering 168 FPS average, compared to 140 FPS for the A770 Turbo, or 136 FPS for the stock performance. Hell, the 1% lows from the 3060 are almost as good as the A770’s average performance. It’s also worth noting that the delta between the average and 1% and 0.1% lows on the A770 are quite large. The 3060 drops 26% from its average, whereas the A770 even on Turbo drops 39% from its average. That contributes to not only a slower than average gaming experience, but a less smooth one too. Interestingly though, at 1440p the average results close up a whole lot. On Turbo the A770 is only 3 FPS slower than the 3060, although the 1% lows still leave a lot to be desired. Despite nearly matching the average performance, the low end figures are over 10 FPS lower on both runs.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is pretty similar, with the 3060 holding a 10% lead over the Turbo result, or around 13% from the stock result. At least this time the 1% and 0.1% low figures match the 3060’s results! Again, at 1440p though the A770 matches or even slightly exceeds the 3060, albeit again with lower 1% and 0.1% low performance. This quirk of better performance at a higher resolution isn’t something we tend to expect with graphics cards, but I have to assume that’s thanks to Intel’s new drivers. There could quite easily be some bottlenecks at 1080p that with future driver revisions we may see those fixed and get much better performance. For the time being though, this is what we’ve got.

CSGO is a game you wouldn’t expect to run all that well on Intel Arc – that’s because Intel’s new driver only works with DirectX 12, which means this DirectX 9 title is running through basically emulation. Still, despite that handicap, the stock performance of the A770 BiFrost here is remarkably close to the 3060. I can’t explain why the Turbo mode results are considerably slower – perhaps specific driver tuning for a given clock speed and as I’ll cover in a minute enabling Turbo mode can confuse that a little. The same happens at 1440p though, although again you can see at least the stock result actually exceeds the 3060’s performance here, although again it offers slower 1% low results despite the higher average.

Cyberpunk is by far the worst result for the A770. I tested and retested this multiple times, but the performance I got here was consistent. At high settings, with no ray tracing, the A770 offers around 66 FPS average, down from over 100 FPS on the 3060. The 1% and 0.1% lows suffer equally, down at around 40 FPS. At 1440p the gap isn’t quite as stark, but that’s only because the 3060 drops to around 73 FPS average, compared to the A770 results which only dip around 10 FPS to 56 FPS average. The 0.1% lows are still faster on the 3060 than the average on the A770. That’s a pretty big deal.

One of the bigger wins for the A770 is Microsoft Flight Simulator, where even at stock it beats the RTX 3060. It’s not a massive margin, and the low end numbers do still let it down a little, but especially on Turbo you can expect nearly 10 FPS more here which is great. It is worth noting that this is using the DirectX 12 mode, where you’ll often find less performance on the table for cards like the 3060 – but seeing as the A770 can’t run the DirectX 11 mode natively, and the game does support DirectX 12, I opted to test with that mode instead. At 1440p the 10 FPS gap remains, if not widens, and interestingly the 1% and 0.1% lows now handily exceed the 3060’s offerings.

Fortnite is my last set of results, where I experienced quite a lot of instability from the A770, even in DirectX 12 mode. With it running in Turbo mode I couldn’t get it to complete a run at all, and even with the stock results I struggled to get even a full 60 seconds of data, but I don’t think it matters much as again the 3060 runs away with the lead. It’s worth noting the 0.1% lows are due to Fortnite doing its usual stuttering – something I’ve experienced on a whole bunch of cards and systems, so I wouldn’t worry too much about that one. At 1440p the gap is much closer again, although the 3060 does hold the performance crown here still.

I mentioned the Turbo mode possibly having some quirks, and looking at the clock speed and GPU power draw, it sure looks like it does. First off, at stock the card runs at 2.4GHz, not 2.2GHz as spec’d. Secondly, it never gets anywhere near the 210W stock power limit. The maximum I recorded it hitting throughout all my testing was 190W, and during most games it was below that. Here’s a graph of the power and core clock during the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark. The most it hits is 170W, and it’s pretty all-over-the-place throughout the run. What makes this confusing is switching to the Turbo mode results. The clock speed now sits at 2.45GHz, and the power goes… down? Yeah, it’s drawing LESS power, for the same or more performance. It even drops from 160W to 140W for the last part of the last scene…

So what does all that mean? Well, for the time being an RTX 3060 is still a better performer. If you game at 1440p the difference is smaller, but it’s still consistently faster than even this overclocked A770. It’s more stable, arguably more feature rich with much better ray tracing performance, and features like DLSS too. It’s also cheaper – a 3060 can be picked up for around £320, whereas this Acer BiFrost card is a solid £400. Of course, the A770 is likely to improve over time as the drivers unlock more performance and stability, but I can’t exactly recommend something based on a hypothetical future. If you buy one of these, you are buying something that isn’t perfect.

With that said, most of that is because this is an Intel A770. Acer seems to have done a pretty good job here with their first GPU. The mixed cooler style is definitely interesting – it has its pros and cons, but I can’t deny it does a good job cooling the chip. I did ask Acer if they are planning on expanding to AMD and NVIDIA cards in the future and was met with the expected “we can’t comment” response, although it did sound like it’s a possibility. I’d definitely like to see Acer’s designs on more cards, although from what we heard from EVGA on their closing down tour, I wouldn’t be hopeful you’ll find Acer’s name on an NVIDIA GPU any time soon. From what I can tell, this is a step up from Intel’s reference design, so if you are dead set on an A770, this does seem like a good option.