"Arc B780" DIY Build: Ray Tracing Benchmarks and Performance Index
Ray tracing has long been the norm—or rather, the standard.
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Stunning ray tracing is making its way into more and more games, so a newly purchased graphics card should be ready for it. The 15 games in the 2026 Ray Tracing Performance Index push graphics cards to their limits, thereby demonstrating their capabilities. As you'll see below, we've compiled the "who's who" of current ray tracing implementations, whose utility is beyond question—it's the graphics card's performance that determines whether you can take advantage of the enhancement. Since we test with maximum ray tracing complexity, upscaling comes to the GPUs' aid in some cases. We test the majority of games at an internal resolution of 67 percent (equivalent to most "Quality" modes). While this means image quality isn't identical across manufacturers, this reflects real-world gaming conditions, and we adhere to this practical setting. Frame generation, variable rate shading, and low-latency options remain consistently disabled to ensure otherwise equal conditions.
DIY Arc B780: Ray Tracing Benchmarks
The high demands of modern ray tracing implementations require more than just mild upscaling on most graphics cards. Let's see how Intel's most powerful graphics processor handles the ray tracing load in 15 games.
If you wish, you can display up to 12 additional graphics cards for each game; we have hidden them for the sake of clarity.
Overclocking also delivers impressive performance gains in ray tracing, with increases of 12 to 22 percent in WQHD. The "Arc B780" performs particularly well in Forza Motorsport, where the clock speed translates directly into performance, and in our power-hungry Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition. This game reliably pushes every architecture and custom design to its power limit—even our manually optimized card. 330 watts aren't enough to stay well above 3 GHz; MEEE forces the GPU to its lowest clock speeds in our test suite (alongside the good old Anno 2070, which we continue to use as a power consumption test). Let's take a look at the performance metrics resulting from the 15 game benchmarks:
Graphics cards without hardware ray tracing support are not included in this chart.
The average performance increase is 16 percent. For rasterization, it's 17 percent—how is that possible? The reason is that the "Arc B780" is utilized more efficiently, which often results in the GPU having to underclock slightly more. This is why the gap is marginally smaller. With this result, the card edges out the GeForce RTX 4070 by a hair's breadth, which may not sound very impressive at first. However, there's a lot going on around it: All Radeon GPUs aside from the Radeon RX 9070 & XT lose some performance, so the "Arc B780" doesn't end up looking too bad. The Radeon RX 9070 GRE, still superior in rasterization, is clearly beaten in ray tracing, and even the Radeon RX 7900 XT is within striking distance. While the gap to the GeForce RTX 5070 and Radeon RX 9070 is shrinking, overall our overclocked card still has no chance of making it to the podium here. On the following page, we'll ramp up the difficulty to level 3 out of 3. How well does ray tracing perform on Intel's fastest graphics card?
