Intel Arc A380 Review: Great for Video, Weak for Gaming

Intel needs more than an Alchemist to save this sinking Arc

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Intel Arc A380
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TOM'S HARDWARE 2022 GPU TEST PC

Intel Core i9-12900K
MSI Pro Z690-A WiFi DDR4
Corsair 2x16GB DDR4-3600 CL16
Crucial P5 Plus 2TB
Cooler Master MWE 1250 V2 Gold
Cooler Master PL360 Flux
Cooler Master HAF500
Windows 11 Pro 64-bit 

Our 2022 GPU testbed consists of a Core i9-12900K processor, MSI Pro Z690-A DDR4 WiFi motherboard, and DDR4-3600 memory (with XMP enabled). We're running Windows 11 to ensure we get the most out of Alder Lake, and we're running the latest game patches and drivers for this testing. We originally started with Intel's 3259 drivers (30.0.101.3259), Intel gave us early access to version 3267 (to fix Spider-Man Remastered performance), then released updated 3268 drivers the next week, and now we're on to version 3276. To say that driver updates are coming fast and furious would be an understatement.

On that note, we've heard about many driver issues, including an inability to fully uninstall and then install new drivers. While the drivers do have a clean install option, Intel's own instructions for one of the beta drivers recommended running Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) before installing the updated drivers. That's our general approach with AMD and Nvidia GPUs as well, just to be clear, and that's how we proceeded with testing. So far, we haven't encountered issues installing or uninstalling (via DDU) the latest releases, so hopefully those bugs are a thing of the past.

Still, there are other issues and complaints with the drivers. One off-putting experience is Intel's use of overlay mode for all driver interactions. You can press Alt+I to open the driver control panel this way, but it still feels a bit odd. We're told Intel is investigating changing the driver interface to a traditional window, or perhaps it will just change the way the overlay works. Either would be an improvement, though it's still possible to use the drivers in their current state.

We also encountered an incompatibility with an older Acer XB270HK monitor, where it simply didn't work right with the A380. We could only set the resolution to 640x480, even though it's a 4K display. Perhaps it's the G-Sync hardware in the display, and an updated driver fixed the issue after we informed Intel about the problem, but the display can't be used to see the POST (Power-On Self Test) or access the system BIOS. Maybe a tweak to the A380 firmware could address the problem, but the display works with every other GPU we've tested in recent years.

As far as game compatibility is concerned, that's harder to assess. We have a standard gaming test suite of eight games, plus six additional games that we test with DirectX Raytracing (DXR) enabled. That's a far cry from testing every game under the sun, though we did also check a couple of recent game releases — Spider-Man Remastered and Saints Row 5 — and both worked with the latest drivers.

Over the course of testing, during the past couple of weeks, we encountered a few issues. Total War: Warhammer 3 worked okay with an earlier driver, but we've seen some rendering issues with the latest 3276 beta release. We're also still unable to run Minecraft with ray tracing enabled, which according to Intel will require the game developer to add the Arc GPUs to the support matrix. An update should be shortly forthcoming, we're told. Full compatibility with every game out there will require time, but Intel seems to be watching and fixing things as quickly as it's able, and hopefully that will continue into the coming years.

We've tested at 1080p with medium settings, and 1080p and 1440p using ultra settings. Thanks to having 6GB of VRAM, the Arc A380 does a bit better in some games than the competing 4GB GPUs from AMD and Nvidia, though 1440p tends to be far too demanding. We've also tested at 1080p in DXR games using "medium" settings for the preset as well as ray tracing effects. Going beyond medium in DXR games isn't advisable on the Arc A380. 

Intel Arc A380 on Older Platforms

We also tested the A380 on our previous generation test PC, which has a Core i9-9900K CPU and an MSI MEG Z390 Ace motherboard. Officially, the 300-series chipsets aren't on the list of Intel validated platforms for Arc GPUs. That feels more than a little absurd, as we've tested the latest AMD and Nvidia GPUs on PCs that are more than a decade old without issues.

You can see in the above video that the PC wouldn't POST properly with the Arc A380 as the only GPU. This appears to be a motherboard compatibility issue, and Intel is aware of the problem. We're told an updated VBIOS or firmware for the Gunnir card should be able to fix things, but we haven't been able to get the required firmware yet. The workaround in our case was to put in a second graphics card — any GPU should suffice — and then we could get into Windows and commenced testing the A380 on an older CPU. We've heard from at least one other Z390 user that it worked fine in a different motherboard (from Asus), but it's still a strange issue to encounter and could affect other older motherboards.

We'll include the Core i9-9900K results at 1080p in our standard benchmarks. There are other caveats to using an Arc GPU, like Intel's "requirement" that your motherboard support PCIe Resizable BAR. Our Z390 board does support the feature (via a beta BIOS), but as mentioned already, even that wasn't quite sufficient. If you don't have a system with ReBAR support, we strongly recommend giving Arc GPUs the cold shoulder until you upgrade the rest of your PC.

Intel Arc A380 Overclocking

There's very little support for overclocking on Arc A380 right now, as traditional utilities like MSI Afterburner don't support the card. We ended up maxing out the power slider in the Arc Control utility, increased the voltage by 0.225V, and set the OC slider to 25 — anything higher than that resulted in instability. The resulting performance gains are relatively limited, and we confined our overclocked testing to 1080p medium. As a quick aside, the most recent driver release appears to have nixed the overclocking options, probably so Intel can correct a few bugs and hopefully get things working better.

Jarred Walton
Jarred Walton

Jarred Walton is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on everything GPU. He has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge '3D decelerators' to today's GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance.

28 Comments Comment from the forums
  • cyrusfox
    Thanks for putting up an review on this. I really am looking for Adobe Suite performance, Photoshop and lightroom. IMy experience is even with a top of the line CPU (12900k) it chugs throuhg some GPU heavy task and was hoping ARC might already be optimized for that.
    Reply
  • brandonjclark
    While it's pretty much what I expected, remember that Intel has DEEP DEEP pockets. If they stick with this division they'll work it out and pretty soon we'll have 3 serious competitors.
    Reply
  • Giroro
    What settings were used for the CPU comparison encodes? I would think that the CPU encode should always be able to provide the highest quality, but possibly with unacceptable performance.
    I'm also having a hard time reading the charts. Is the GTX 1650 the dashed hollow blue line, or the solid hollow blue line?
    A good encoder at the lowest price is not a bad option for me to have. Although, I don't have much faith that Intel will get their drivers in a good enough state before the next generation of GPUs.
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    Giroro said:
    What settings were used for the CPU comparison encodes? I would think that the CPU encode should always be able to provide the highest quality, but possibly with unacceptable performance.
    I'm also having a hard time reading the charts. Is the GTX 1650 the dashed hollow blue line, or the solid hollow blue line?
    A good encoder at the lowest price is not a bad option for me to have. Although, I don't have much faith that Intel will get their drivers in a good enough state before the next generation of GPUs.
    Are you viewing on a phone or a PC? Because I know our mobile experience can be... lacking, especially for data dense charts. On PC, you can click the arrow in the bottom-right to get the full-size charts, or at least get a larger view which you can then click the "view original" option in the bottom-right. Here are the four line charts, in full resolution, if that helps:

    https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/dVSjCCgGHPoBrgScHU36vM.pnghttps://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/hGy9QffWHov4rY6XwKQTmM.pnghttps://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/d2zv239egLP9dwfKPSDh5N.pnghttps://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/PGkuG8uq25fNU7o7M8GbEN.png
    The GTX 1650 is a hollow dark blue dashed line. The AMD GPU is the hollow solid line, CPU is dots, A380 is solid filled line, and Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti (or really, Turing encoder) is solid dashes. I had to switch to dashes and dots and such because the colors (for 12 lines in one chart) were also difficult to distinguish from each other, and I included the tables of the raw data just to help clarify what the various scores were if the lines still weren't entirely sensible. LOL

    As for the CPU encoding, it was done with the same constraints as the GPU: single pass and the specified bitrate, which is generally how you would set things up for streaming (AFAIK, because I'm not really a streamer). 2-pass encoding can greatly improve quality, but of course it takes about twice as long and can't be done with livestreaming. I did not look into other options that might improve the quality at the cost of CPU encoding time, and I also didn't look if there were other options that could improve the GPU encoding quality.
    cyrusfox said:
    Thanks for putting up an review on this. I really am looking for Adobe Suite performance, Photoshop and lightroom. IMy experience is even with a top of the line CPU (12900k) it chugs throuhg some GPU heavy task and was hoping ARC might already be optimized for that.
    I suspect Arc won't help much at all with Photoshop or Lightroom compared to whatever GPU you're currently using (unless you're using integrated graphics I suppose). Adobe's CC apps have GPU accelerated functions for certain tasks, but complex stuff still chugs pretty badly in my experience. If you want to export to AV1, though, I think there's a way to get that into Premiere Pro and the Arc could greatly increase the encoding speed.
    Reply
  • magbarn
    Wow, 50% larger die size (much more expensive for Intel vs. AMD) and performs much worse than the 6500XT. Stick a fork in Arc, it's done.
    Reply
  • Giroro
    JarredWaltonGPU said:
    Are you viewing on a phone or a PC? Because I know our mobile experience can be... lacking, especially for data dense charts
    I'm viewing on PC, just the graph legend shows a very similar blue oval for both cards
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    magbarn said:
    Wow, 50% larger die size (much more expensive for Intel vs. AMD) and performs much worse than the 6500XT. Stick a fork in Arc, it's done.
    Much of the die size probably gets taken up by XMX cores, QuickSync, DisplayPort 2.0, etc. But yeah, it doesn't seem particularly small considering the performance. I can't help but think with fully optimized drivers, performance could improve another 25%, but who knows if we'll ever get such drivers?
    Reply
  • waltc3
    Considering what you had to work with, I thought this was a decent GPU review. Just a few points that occurred to me while reading...

    I wouldn't be surprised to see Intel once again take its marbles and go home and pull the ARCs altogether, as Intel did decades back with its ill-fated acquisition of Real3D. They are probably hoping to push it at a loss at retail to get some of their money back, but I think they will be disappointed when that doesn't happen. As far as another competitor in the GPU markets goes, yes, having a solid competitor come in would be a good thing, indeed, but only if the product meant to compete actually competes. This one does not. ATi/AMD have decades of experience in the designing and manufacturing of GPUs, as does nVidia, and in the software they require, and the thought that Intel could immediately equal either company's products enough to compete--even after five years of R&D on ARC--doesn't seem particularly sound, to me. So I'm not surprised, as it's exactly what I thought it would amount to.

    I wondered why you didn't test with an AMD CPU...was that a condition set by Intel for the review? Not that it matters, but It seems silly, and I wonder if it would have made a difference of some kind. I thought the review was fine as far it goes, but one thing that I felt was unnecessarily confusing was the comparison of the A380 in "ray tracing" with much more expensive nVidia solutions. You started off restricting the A380 to the 1650/Super, which doesn't ray trace at all, and the entry level AMD GPUs which do (but not to any desirable degree, imo)--which was fine as they are very closely priced. But then you went off on a tangent with 3060's 3050's, 2080's, etc. because of "ray tracing"--which I cannot believe the A380 is any good at doing at all.

    The only thing I can say that might be a little illuminating is that Intel can call its cores and rt hardware whatever it wants to call them, but what matters is the image quality and the performance at the end of the day. I think Intel used the term "tensor core" to make it appear to be using "tensor cores" like those in the RTX 2000/3000 series, when they are not the identical tensor cores at all...;) I was glad to see the notation because it demonstrates that anyone can make his own "tensor core" as "tensor" is just math. I do appreciate Intel doing this because it draws attention to the fact that "tensor cores" are not unique to nVidia, and that anyone can make them, actually--and call them anything they want--like for instance "raytrace cores"...;)
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    waltc3 said:
    I wouldn't be surprised to see Intel once again take its marbles and go home and pull the ARCs altogether, as Intel did decades back with its ill-fated acquisition of Real3D. They are probably hoping to push it at a loss at retail to get some of their money back, but I think they will be disappointed when that doesn't happen. As far as another competitor in the GPU markets goes, yes, having a solid competitor come in would be a good thing, indeed, but only if the product meant to compete actually competes. This one does not. ATi/AMD have decades of experience in the designing and manufacturing of GPUs, as does nVidia, and in the software they require, and the thought that Intel could immediately equal either company's products enough to compete--even after five years of R&D on ARC--doesn't seem particularly sound, to me. So I'm not surprised, as it's exactly what I thought it would amount to.
    Intel seems committed to doing dedicated GPUs, and it makes sense. The data center and supercomputer markets all basically use GPU-like hardware. Battlemage is supposedly well underway in development, and if Intel can iterate and get the cards out next year, with better drivers, things could get a lot more interesting. It might lose billions on Arc Alchemist, but if it can pave the way for future GPUs that end up in supercomputers in five years, that will ultimately be a big win for Intel. It could have tried to make something less GPU-like and just gone for straight compute, but then porting existing GPU programs to the design would have been more difficult, and Intel might actually (maybe) think graphics is becoming important.
    I wondered why you didn't test with an AMD CPU...was that a condition set by Intel for the review? Not that it matters, but It seems silly, and I wonder if it would have made a difference of some kind. I thought the review was fine as far it goes, but one thing that I felt was unnecessarily confusing was the comparison of the A380 in "ray tracing" with much more expensive nVidia solutions. You started off restricting the A380 to the 1650/Super, which doesn't ray trace at all, and the entry level AMD GPUs which do (but not to any desirable degree, imo)--which was fine as they are very closely priced. But then you went off on a tangent with 3060's 3050's, 2080's, etc. because of "ray tracing"--which I cannot believe the A380 is any good at doing at all.
    Intel set no conditions on the review. We purchased this card, via a go-between, from China — for WAY more than the card is worth, and then it took nearly two months to get things sorted out and have the card arrive. That sucked. If you read the ray tracing section, you'll see why I did the comparison. It's not great, but it matches an RX 6500 XT and perhaps indicates Intel's RTUs are better than AMD's Ray Accelerators, and maybe even better than Nvidia's Ampere RT cores — except Nvidia has a lot more RT cores than Arc has RTUs. I restricted testing to cards priced similarly, plus the next step up, which is why the RTX 2060/3050 and RX 6600 are included.
    The only thing I can say that might be a little illuminating is that Intel can call its cores and rt hardware whatever it wants to call them, but what matters is the image quality and the performance at the end of the day. I think Intel used the term "tensor core" to make it appear to be using "tensor cores" like those in the RTX 2000/3000 series, when they are not the identical tensor cores at all...;) I was glad to see the notation because it demonstrates that anyone can make his own "tensor core" as "tensor" is just math. I do appreciate Intel doing this because it draws attention to the fact that "tensor cores" are not unique to nVidia, and that anyone can make them, actually--and call them anything they want--like for instance "raytrace cores"...;)
    Tensor cores refer to a specific type of hardware matrix unit. Google has TPUs, various other companies are also making tensor core-like hardware. Tensorflow is a popular tool for AI workloads, which is why the "tensor cores" name came into being AFAIK. Intel calls them Xe Matrix Engines, but the same principles apply: lots of matrix math, focusing especially on multiply and accumulate as that's what AI training tends to use. But tensor cores have literally nothing to do with "raytrace cores," which need to take DirectX Raytracing structures (or VulkanRT) to be at all useful.
    Reply
  • escksu
    The ray tracing shows good promise. The video encoder is the best. 3d performance is meh but still good enough for light gaming.

    If it's retails price is indeed what it shows, then I believe it will sell. Of course, Intel won't make much (if any) from these cards.
    Reply