Despite countless rumors suggesting the Intel Arc A370M would only be competitive with previous-generation GPUs, it is much faster than we initially thought. According to new official benchmarks from PCWorld, the A370M can go toe to toe with Nvidia's RTX 3050 mobile GPU in gaming and productivity applications.
Intel's Arc A370M launched around two months ago and represented one of Intel's entry-level products in its Arc 3 series of GPUs, accompanied by the lower-end Arc A350M. The Arc A370M comes with 8 Xe cores and a graphics clock of 1550MHz. Memory maxes out at 4GB, featuring GDDR6 modules and a 64-bit wide bus. GPU power will be anywhere between 35-50W, depending on the laptop model.
Testing was completed on an MSI Summit E16 Flip Evo notebook, featuring Intel's reference design for the A370M. The RTX 3050 notebooks featured in the tests include the HP Spectre x360 and the Asus Vivobook Pro 15 OLED.
In 3DMark Time Spy, the A370M notebook scored a rather impressive 4405 points, coming ahead of RTX 3050 laptops, including the HP Spectre notebook with 3772 points and the Vivobook Pro featuring a score of 4396 points.
In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, The A370M outperformed the HP Spectre RTX 3050 notebook, coming out with a 59 FPS average at 1080P on the highest settings. The RTX 3050 only managed a flat 50FPS.
Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition was another game PCWorld tested, with the A370M losing this time to the RTX 3050. The A370 scored 19 FPS while the 3050 gained 22 FPS. Without question, the unplayable frame rates can be attributed to the ray tracing requirements demanded in this specific version of Metro Exodus.
However, the good news is that Intel's A370M can play ray tracing games if that is something you really want. With FSR or Intel's future XeSS upscaling technologies, we wouldn't be surprised to see playable FPS on the A370M with ray tracing enabled.
Intel's A370M managed to beat the RTX 3050 by 53 seconds in the Topaz Video Enhanced AI application, with a completion time of just 134 seconds. The RTX 3050 was slightly ahead at 187 seconds.
PCWorld's testing is good news for Intel's new GPUs. It shows that even its entry-level products are not as slow as we thought and can perform on par with Nvidia's latest RTX 3050 GPUs. We can't wait to see what Intel's Arc 5 series and Arc 7 series mobile GPUs will be able to do against Nvidia's RTX 3060 and RTX 3070 mobile graphics.
