• At rAge Expo 2022 Intel announced that it would be bring its Arc A750 and Arc A770 GPUs to South Africa.
• The GPUs come from the ASUS stable and will feature the brand’s AeroBlade technology.
• The Acer Intel Arc GPUs are expected in mid-2023 with prices starting at under R10 000.

Since 12th October Intel’s Arc GPUs have been available in many parts of the world, except for here in South Africa.

While Intel has dabbled in the GPU space before, its Arc A770 and Arc A750 GPUs are widely considered the first real push from the company to make GPUs in recent years.

So are Intel’s GPUs coming to South Africa? In a word, yes, but we don’t recommend waiting for a release.

This morning at a press briefing ahead of rAge, Africa Consumer Sales manager at Intel, Nitesh Doolabh (pictured above) announced that Acer would be bringing Intel Arc GPUs into South Africa. The catch is that these GPUs won’t arrive until at least the middle of the year.

The GPUs will come from Acer and this is it’s first real foray into making a GPU. While the firm incorporates GPUs into its notebooks, becoming an add-in board partner is a big deal that is three years in the making.

However, we have to wonder why Intel and Acer are waiting so long to launch these GPUs locally.

One reason might be the fact that Intel’s GPUs haven’t been up to scratch as far as reviews are concerned. Performance on DirectX 11 leaves much to be desired and many games performed rather poorly under review conditions.

This comes down to driver compatibility and the fact that Intel simply hasn’t been in the GPU space as long as Nvidia and AMD. While some have argued that gamers and PC builders should embrace Intel’s push into GPUs, asking consumers to take a risk so that Intel can widen it’s market presence feels like a hard ask.

Speaking with Doolabh, we have learned that driver updates have been pushed out which improve performance for DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 games. The Intel manager tells us that this has led to a 80 percent improvement in performance. You can hear more about this as well as why South Africa is getting these cards so late in our Africast releasing later today.

Acer’s country manager, Glenn du Toit, says Intel’s Arc GPUs from the Acer stable will be priced below the R10 000 mark but things can change between now and mid-2023.