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Intel, like it had promised, has released its first Arc desktop graphics card with the new Arc A380. This is an entry-level card meant to compete with the likes of AMD RX 6400, 6500 XT and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650. In fact, Intel claims that the card offers up to 25% better value compared to the RX 6400.
According to the first independent review, although the new Arc A380 was decent, it did not manage to beat either AMD or Nvidia"s offerings in actual games, even though it shined in synthetic benchmarks. The testing was done on an Intel i5-12400 CPU paired with a PCIe 4.0-capable Asus B660 board.
However, a new review on an AMD platform is adding more to the story of Arc. The test results suggest that Intel"s Arc graphics cards may not yet be optimized for AMD platforms just yet.
The Gunnir Arc A380 Photon was coupled with a Ryzen 5 5600 and a PCIe 4.0-ready Asus TUF Gaming B550M-PLUS WiFi II motherboard. The gaming numbers show performance regression for Arc in almost all of the game titles and sometimes the margins are massive. For example, in Forza Horizon 5, the Arc A380 is 17% slower on the AMD platform (73%) compared when it"s run on Intel (88%).
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Intel has already confirmed that Arc requires PCIe Resizable BAR (ReBAR) for optimal performance and so the test was conducted with the feature enabled on both platforms. However, it"s possible that Arc is un-optimized still for AMD"s ReBAR implementation, also called Smart Access Memory (SAM).
The good news is that Intel has hinted that it will optimize Arc for AMD platforms later in its official announcement. This is the polar opposite of what the company did with its previous Iris Xe desktop card launch when it outright declared no plans for supporting AMD or older Intel platforms.