Comparing the RTX 3050 and Arc A750 continues from our previous look at the RTX 3050 vs RX 6600, this time swapping out AMD for Nvidia in the popular $200 price bracket. Nvidia failed to take down AMD, but does it fare any better against Intel? These are slightly older GPUs, as no company has seen fit to offer anything more recent in the budget sector, so let's find out who wins this matchup.
The RTX 3050 debuted at the start of 2022 and represents Nvidia's latest xx50-class desktop graphics card, with no successor in the pipeline for the RTX 40-series (at least that we know of). The card nominally launched at $249, though we were still living in an Ethereum crypto mining world so most cards ended up selling well above that mark. Two and a half years later, it's one of the few RTX 30-series Ampere GPUs that remains relatively available, and it's now going for around $199, the rest having been supplanted by the newer Ada Lovelace GPUs.
The Arc A750 is Intel's mainstream / budget offering based on the Arc Alchemist GPU architecture. It debuted two years ago and has been one of the most promising offerings for Intel's first lineup of discrete graphics cards in over 20 years. Driver support was a big concerns at launch, but Intel has made excellent progress on that front, which could sway things in favor of the Intel GPU in this face-off. Maybe. Similar to the RTX 3050, the A750 started out as a $289 graphics card, then saw an official price cut to $249, and now it's often selling at or below $199 in the wake of new graphics card releases from Nvidia and AMD.
While we're now a couple of years past the 3050 and A750 launch dates, they remain relevant due to the lack of new sub-$200 options. So, let's take an updated look at these budget-friendly GPUs in light of today's market and see how they stack up. We'll discuss performance, value, features, technology, software, and power efficiency — and as usual, those are listed in order of generally decreasing importance.
