Intel's first discreet graphics card, the Arc A380, was released! Well, it was released, but only in China so far. If nothing else, Intel fulfilled their promise of releasing their first discreet Arc GPU.
The first official benchmarks for the Intel Arc A380 have naturally started to trickle out and the results are not great. These "official" reviews come courtesy of Intel directly via their reviewer's guide. Even with these coming direct from Intel, the numbers seem to line up pretty closely to unofficial benchmarks that came out of China about a week back.
These benchmarks from Intel show that the Arc A380 falls short of cards like the Nvidia GTX 1650 and the AMD RX 6400 in gaming performance. The GTX 1650 came out about three years ago now and the RX 6400 is a low-profile budget card that most people don't recommend given its $150-$160 price tag.
The results, seen below (courtesy PCGamer) are based off of Intel's own reference card, a 75W card that requires no extra power connectors. This limits the card to 2,000MHz clock speed. Partner boards can add in a 6-pin or 8-pin connector to offer 80W or 87W versions at 2,250MHz and 2,350MHz clock speeds respectively. Even with that tiny bit of extra power, do not expect to see major performance gains from partner card offerings.
While there are a couple of cases where Intel's card performs better than the competition, the overall average has the A380 being 15% slower than the GTX 1650 and 8% slower than the RX 6400.
One thing Intel did not include in their official benchmarks were synthetic benchmarks such as 3DMark. Benchmarks that came out a week ago show that the Arc A380 performing much better than the GTX 1650. Independent reviews saw the A380 performing almost 43% higher than the GTX 1650 and even surpassing the RX 6500XT "by a shade."
It could very well be that drivers for Intel's cards just aren't fully ready yet. The Arc A380 has a theoretical performance of anywhere from 4 to 4.8 TFLOPS. The GTX 1650 tops out at just shy of 3 TFLOPS. The state of the drivers could be just one of several reasons why Intel has not released the Arc line globally yet. Expect to see these benchmarks improve in the months ahead as Intel refines their drivers.
If Intel can get their drivers up to snuff and improve upon their gaming performance, they could have an interesting piece of hardware to offer for entry-level and mainstream builds. The price of the card is roughly $150 (USD), which places it about in line with the AMD RX 6400.
