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

Intel needs more than an Alchemist to save this sinking Arc

By Jarred Walton
last updated
Intel Arc A380
(Image: © Tom's Hardware)

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Intel's Arc A380 is a rare thing in the world of graphics cards: a true newcomer. After decades of AMD vs Nvidia, we now have a three-horse race — or at least that's the theory. In practice, it's more like the two-horse race we're used to, with a young colt learning to walk as it makes its way around the track, well behind the two frontrunners. But perhaps that colt will grow up to be a champion, given another couple of years and plenty of training.

The Arc A380 actually has a somewhat reasonable price, a nice change of pace. $139 for a budget GPU shouldn't feel like a great value, but in a world where cards like the GTX 1630 are being sold for $199 — higher than the superior GTX 1650 and GTX 1650 Super — a $139 MSRP seems pretty good. Three years ago we would have expected a card like the A380 to go for $99, but inflation and all that nasty stuff has taken its toll.

Still, real-world pricing and availability will be a major consideration. Newegg has the ASRock Arc A380 Challenger listed for $139, but that's about the only major place currently selling the A380 in the US and it's on backorder. Meanwhile, the GTX 1650 Super and RX 6500 XT both start at around $180. That's about a 30% increase in price, for about a 20–25% improvement in performance, but you also get to avoid all the potential teething pains of Intel's drivers, and that's hard to overstate.

If you're not specifically looking to stay below $200, however, there are even better options. The RX 6600 starts at $250 and the RTX 2060 starts at $230. Nvidia's GPU is the lowest cost RTX model right now, still providing the full DLSS experience along with ray tracing hardware, and it's 80–100% faster than the Arc A380. The RX 6600 meanwhile is about 120% faster than the A380. Either way, you'd be getting much better value by stepping up to the next level of GPUs.

While there always seems to be another level of GPU, at least up until the $1,000 mark, going beyond the RX 6600 and RTX 2060 generally gives you diminishing returns. You also get into territory that will soon be claimed by the upcoming RDNA 3 and Ada Lovelace GPUs, and for older PCs, you probably don't want to put too much more GPU performance into the system before looking at a full PC upgrade.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Intel's media encoding capabilities are a high point for the A380, assuming you'll use them. Right now, H.264 still seems to be the most popular codec for video streaming due to HEVC licensing costs. There are exceptions, but AV1 could be the best replacement for H.264 we're likely to see in the near term. It's still in the early stages of adoption right now, though YouTube is experimenting with AV1.

The thing is, looking at our performance and quality comparisons, it's difficult to say how much better AV1 is compared to HEVC or VP9. For the content we tested, it's basically a wash. All three are better than H.264 but very similar to each other. AMD and Nvidia do well with HEVC content encoding, but for VP9 and AV1, Intel currently offers the best solution.

Gaming performance for the Arc A380 ends up being pretty mediocre. It's faster than the GTX 1650 and RX 6400, usually, though there are occasions where it comes up short. Drivers remain a concern, so if you play a lot of indie games or more esoteric options, we'd stick with the tried and true AMD and Nvidia drivers and hardware. Big name games on the other hand seem to be getting a decent level of tuning and testing from Intel.

Ultimately, the Arc A380 offers too little too late for most people. Anyone with an older PC looking to upgrade the graphics might be tempted, but Arc can be finicky on older platforms. There's still hope for the higher end Arc models, however, especially if Intel can keep pricing competitive. Intel's own testing suggests the Arc A750 can beat the RTX 3060 on performance, but what will it cost? Or how about the rumored Arc A580, which Intel hasn't said much about? And will any of those other Arc GPUs work better on slightly older PCs? Those are all important questions.

Arc Alchemist represents Intel's foot in the GPU door. It's far from perfect but there are occasional hints of greatness. Perhaps things will continue to improve, but more likely we'll be looking forward to the eventual Arc Battlemage products, perhaps as early as next year, before Intel's GPU ambitions truly begin to shine.

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