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With a starting price of $180, Intel is clearly going after the mainstream budget gaming market. Some users may have higher resolution displays, but 1080p will be the primary use case for the Arc A580, so that's where we'll start.
Our current test regimen gives us a global view of performance using the geometric mean of all 15 games in our test suite, including both the ray tracing and rasterization test suites. Then we've got separate charts for the rasterization and ray tracing suites, plus charts for the individual games. If you don't like the "overall performance" chart, the other two are the same views we've previously shown.
Our test suite is intentionally heavier on ray tracing games than what you might normally encounter. That's largely because ray tracing games are the most demanding games you'll encounter, so if a new card can handle ray tracing reasonably well, it should do just fine with less demanding games. Still, as a sub-$200 graphics card, maxed out ray tracing performance probably isn't the first consideration of anyone looking at this card, and we'll keep that in mind as we sift through the results.
As we expected, given the price, the Arc A580 sits near the bottom end of our charts. However, keep in mind that it's currently the least expensive card in the charts as well. The closest card, price-wise, is the RX 6600 from AMD, and the A580 clearly beats that card and comes relatively close to the RX 6650 XT.
Nvidia's RTX 3050 sits at the bottom of the chart, as you'd expect. The RTX 3060 meanwhile delivers about 10% higher performance than the A580, and the same goes for the Arc A750. Finally, for the higher priced Arc A770 16GB, RX 6700 10GB, and RTX 4060, Nvidia claims the top spot with its latest architecture. We're not even including the potential for DLSS or Frame Generation either, though upscaling at 1080p tends to have more noticeable artifacts than at 1440p and 4K.
This global view of performance also includes ray tracing where AMD's GPUs struggle more than their Intel and Nvidia counterparts. Let's move on to the rasterization charts to see where things stand for a more realistic suite of games that you'd play on the A580.
Looking just at the nine rasterization games in our test suite, the Arc A580 and RX 6600 are basically tied, with the very slight advantage for AMD's GPU. The A750 is again about 10% faster, as is the RTX 3060, though the 1% lows are quite a bit better on Nvidia's card.
AMD's step up from the RX 6600 delivers quite a jump in performance, with the RX 6650 XT and RX 7600 offering 22% and 28% higher performance, respectively. Note also that even the fully enabled Arc A770 16GB can't quite match the rasterization performance offered by the RX 6650 XT, and Nvidia's RTX 4060 outpaces even AMD's RX 6700 10GB. While there's still some question whether 8GB of memory is "enough" for modern games, if you're planning on gaming at 1080p, it generally won't be a problem.
Looking at the individual charts, the rankings swap around quite a bit. At times, the A580 can match or even surpass the RTX 3060. Other times, it falls quite a bit behind Nvidia's previous generation part. But it's universally faster than the RTX 3050, just in case you were considering picking up one of those. Intel's best results overall are in Red Dead Redemption 2, which is also our sole Vulkan API game, so that's sort of interesting.
The ray tracing story might feel a bit of a letdown, considering the Arc A580 only averages 36 fps across our test suite. But like Nvidia, Intel's Arc GPUs easily outperform AMD's GPUs when it comes to ray tracing performance. The A580 leads the RX 6700 10GB by 5% percent overall, and comes in 7% behind the RTX 3060. It's also 56% faster than AMD's RX 6600.
That's the big picture, however, and we do need to look at the details. Bright Memory Infinite benchmark fails to break 30 fps on all of the cards tested with the exception of the RTX 4060. Cyberpunk 2077 likewise falls below 30 fps on most of the cards, with the RTX 3060, Arc A770 16GB, and RTX 4060 breaking into "playable" territory. So two of the DXR (DirectX Raytracing) games should be played without DXR on most GPUs that cost less than $300.
Still, with XeSS or FSR2 upscaling (depending on the game and what it supports), you should be able to get a pretty good experience even from the Arc A580. We still generally find DLSS 2 upscaling to provide the best image quality, followed by XeSS and then FSR2. Unfortunately, XeSS support isn't nearly as widespread as DLSS or FSR2.
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