Last week, Intel launched the Arc A380, with products initially available in China only. Today, several Chinese sites and social media users published their independent third-party reviews. We've taken a closer look at a video review published by Bilibili user Shenmedounengce to see if there is any insight to share before we can get our own A380 in the Tom's Hardware labs. In brief, Intel's first Arc Alchemist desktop GPU likely won't displace the best graphics cards, and it did much better in synthetic benchmarks than the suite of games tested.
The Bilibili user's test platform was relatively modest, which is a fair choice given the target market of the Arc A380. It's a Windows 11 PC based around an Intel Core i5-12400, 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, and an Asus B660M motherboard, which should be ample for supporting the likes of the new Arc A380. The Gunnir branded model was used, which appears to be the first one to be released. Intel's new hope was pitted against the following contenders in the same system: a GTX 1650, RX 6400, RX 6500 XT, and RTX 3050.
In synthetic tests, the Intel Arc A380 was fairly impressive, beating out all rivals except the RTX 3050 in Time Spy and Port Royal, but falling back a bit to best just the GTX 1650 in Fire Strike. Unfortunately, this marked the end of the good news for those hoping for an impressive Intel Arc debut.
In the six games tested at 1080p (League of Legends, GTA V, PUGB, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Forza Horizon 5, and Red Dead Redemption 2), Intel's Arc A380 was consistently the poorest performer. Above, we have shared a video screenshot of the detailed Red Dead Redemption 2 performance comparison. This is a fairly typical bar chart across all the games.
There's also a summary chart with all six games, though that omits the much better performance offered by the RX 6500 XT and RTX 3050.
With the performance comparisons above, it is worth looking at the differences in the underlying technologies.
| Header Cell - Column 0 |
Arc A380 |
Radeon RX 6400 |
GeForce GTX 1650 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Node |
TSMC N6 |
TSMC N6 | TSMC 12nm |
| Architecture |
Alchemist |
RDNA 2 |
Turing |
| GPU |
DG2-128EU |
Navi 24 |
TU117 |
| Graphics cores |
1,024 |
768 |
896 |
| FP32 TFLOPS |
5.02 |
3.57 |
2.90 |
| Memory | 6GB GDDR6 96-bit 15.5Gbps, 192 GB/s | 4GB GDDR6 64-bit 16Gbps. 144 GB/s | 4GB GDDR5 128-bit 8Gbps, 128 GB/s |
| TDP/TBP |
75 Watt |
53 Watt |
75 Watt |
| Video Codecs | AV1, H.264, H.265 decode/encode | H.264, H.265 decode only | H.264, H.265 decode/encode |
| Approx Price |
$135 |
$159 | $190 |
Pricing of the Intel Arc A380 in China suggests US retailers will advertise these models at around $135, as we explained last week. At the moment, that would help Intel undercut its rivals in the above table for its lower gaming performance, which seems appropriate. However, with the Intel GPUs having better performance in 3DMark benchmarks and decent-looking stats, it's natural to wonder whether Intel's drivers could improve to provide significant uplifts in actual gaming.
We're looking forward to getting an Intel Arc A380 desktop graphics card for our own extensive tests. However, according to these early results, it doesn't look like Intel will rank too highly in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, unless drivers improve a lot in the coming months.
