Arc A380: the performance of the Intel graphics card is revealed

Intel has been communicating for almost a year on their Arc Alchemist graphics card, but it must be admitted that the manufacturer has become more discreet in recent months, between delays and reduced performance. Originally, if Intel GPUs were to compete with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30s, they could eventually arrive at the same time as the RTX 40 series, and the performance gap would inevitably widen in favor of Nvidia …

The first samples fall

Some benchmarks have reached us from the first models of the Arc A380, a small entry-level graphics card sold in China to integrators that can customize it andoverclock slightly. This GPU is clearly not designed to run the current triple A titles in 4K, but is intended for game in Full HD (1080p), and it becomes even necessary to reduce the graphics on the most demanding titles.

Our colleagues from Wccftech released official Intel data on the performance of this card with some well-known games, to compare it with its direct competitors: GeForce GTX 1650 from Nvidia and Radeon RX 6400 from AMD, which can be found for around € 200 right now. For information, the mentioned games were set to 1080p and with graphics in average quality.

We can see that the GTX 1650 offers much better performance than the A380 in most games with 10, 20 or even 30 fps more. The Radeon RX 6400 is also faster in general, except in a few titles like The Witcher 3, Total War: Troy Where F1 2021. Pretty disappointing results, which certainly show that it is possible to play fluently at more than 60 fps, but the selected games are not very young or not very demanding.

AMD processors at a disadvantage?

A Chinese user has also shown (via Bilibili) that using an AMD CPU with the Arc A380 lowers its performance by an average of 17% in games compared to an A380 + Intel CPU configuration. The explanation may lie behind the fact that the Resizable Bar (a technology that gives the CPU direct access to video memory) is supported by processors used with Intel Arc GPUs. But this is not the case for AMD processors, which have their own Smart Access Memory technology.

The Intel Arc A380 is therefore getting off to a rocky start, and it is hoped that the more advanced Alchemist series GPUs will be better positioned relative to the competition. Without offering high performance, these GPUs could possibly benefit from a good price-quality ratio, but it will be necessary to ensure a minimum in terms of performance and compatibility. Currently, the A380 is only distributed in China at a suggested retail price of around € 160. We should not see it arrive in Europe before the end of the summer.