Intel releases Arc A380 desktop GPU and it's better than AMD and Nvidia's offerings [Update]

Intel has kept its promise. Last month, the company stated that it will be releasing the first Arc desktop GPUs in China and it has kept its word by unveiling its new Arc A380. The Arc A380 is an entry level desktop graphics card from Intel's Arc 3 lineup and in China, the card is priced 1030 Yuan (with VAT) which is around $153.

At this price, the card claims to offer around 25% better performance than the $160 RX 6400 from AMD. Also, the card packs 6GB VRAM instead of 4GB which makes it, on paper, a better alternative than Nvidia's GTX 1650 SUPER, although currently all 1650 variants are overpriced.

The image below shows all the features of the Arc A380:

The full specs for the Arc A380 are given below:

GPU Specifications

• Xe-cores: 8
• Render Slices: 2
• Ray Tracing Units: 8
• Intel® Xe Matrix Extensions (Intel® XMX) Engines: 128
• Xe Vector Engines: 128
• Graphics Base Clock: 2000 MHz
• TDP: 75 W

Memory Specifications

• Memory Size: 6 GB
• Memory Type: GDDR6
• Memory Interface: 96 bit
• Memory Bandwidth: 192 GB/s
• Memory Speed: 16 Gbps

Intel has provided the following performance number for Arc A380:

If you can't read Chinese, that's alright. On its Performance Index page Intel has explained what this graph shows. It reads:

Claim: Intel® Arc™ A380 grpahics delivers above 60 FPS performance at 1080p across popular games

- Game workloads that support this claim are Naraka Bladepoint, PUBG, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, Apex Legends, Fortnite, Overwatch, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, League of Legends, NiZhan, Dota 2, all run with medium settings at 1080p resolution.

The company is essentially driving home the point here that the Arc A380 can offer playable 60+fps in most popular titles at respectable settings. The company has also provided more performance-related figures with Intel's XeSS image upscaling technology, as well as AV1 encoding.

Interestingly, the page says the tests were run using the Arc driver version 30.0.101.1735, which isn't optimized for A380. So with the optimized 1736 driver version, the performance may end up being a bit better.

Source: VideoCardz via The Register

Edit: More details about Intel's Arc A380 performance claims are added below:

Claim: The Intel® Arc™ A380 GPU, with a recommended customer price of 1,030 yuan, delivers up to 25% better performance per yuan than available competitive offerings as measured by performance on a selection of popular games.

GPU(s):

• Intel® Arc™ A380 6GB reference card
• AMD Radeon RX 6400 4GB

System Configuration: Intel® Arc™ A380 configuration: Graphics Driver: 30.0.101.1735, Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-12600K, MSI PRO Z690-A WIFI DDR4, BIOS: 1.3, Memory: 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 @ 3200MHz, Storage: MP600 PRO XT 4TB, OS: Windows 11 Version 10.0.22000.675

AMD Radeon RX 6400 configuration: Graphics Driver: 30.0.15021.11005, Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-12600K, MSI PRO Z690-A WIFI DDR4, BIOS: 1.3, Memory: 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 @ 3200MHz, Storage: MP600 PRO XT 4TB, OS: Windows 11 Version 10.0.22000.675

Measurements: All FPS (frames per second) scores are either measured with PresentMon or in-game benchmark. All gameplay has a documented workload running the same replay or game scenario across all configurations and test runs.

Game workloads that support this claim are Naraka Bladepoint (27)%, JX Remake (27%), F1 2021 (26%), Rust (24%), Total Saga: Troy (22%), The Witcher 3 (22%), Arcadegeddon (21%), Metro Exodus (18%), NiZhan (16%), Wolfenstein: Youngblood (15%), Destiny 2 (14%).

All games tested at 1080p resolution and medium settings presets.

Period: Pricing and testing as of June 12, 2022. Radeon RX 6400 pricing of 1199 yuan on JD.com.

Source: Intel

Update: Intel has updated its video card specs and downclocked the memory speed from 16Gbps to 15.5Gbps. This means the total memory bandwidth too has been reduced now from 192 to 185 GB/s. Rest of the specifications, mentioned above, remain un-altered.

There was also a mis-translation of what Intel was offering with the Arc A380. Intel claims that its new Arc A380 offers 25% better value than the AMD RX 6400 and not outright 25% better than the latter in raw performance like it was written in the article.