Following Intel's graphics card misadventures is like watching a slow motion freeway pile-up
Intel's first discrete graphics card of the Arc generation—its first attempt at a gaming graphics card in many a long year—is finally out. In China. For an unfathomable price(opens in new tab). Which also means we're getting independent performance reviews of the discrete Arc A380 Alchemist GPU. And it doesn't look good.
Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out exactly why Intel took this approach. But whatever the reasoning behind it's release as the vanguard of Intel's push into discrete graphics cards, the Arc A380 looks like a GPU that can't even compare with Nvidia's last-gen GTX 1650.
Unless you count synthetic 3DMark tests, that is, where it surprisingly outperforms Nvidia's old entry-level card, as well as AMD's RDNA 2-based RX 6400 and RX 6500 XT(opens in new tab). That's in both the Time Spy and ray tracing Port Royal benchmarks.
That would be an impressive result if it wasn't for the fact that the actual game benchmarks shown by the Shenmedoungce on Bilibili(opens in new tab) (via Videocardz(opens in new tab)) didn't have the Intel GPU behind all three of those rival cards in every test it ran. They're not strange games either, with League of Legends, GTA V, PUBG, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Forza Horizon 5, and Red Dead Redemption 2 all given a run out on the Arc GPU.
I mean, it can run them all, which is grand. But when your new entry-level graphics card can't compete with an entry-level GeForce GPU released over three years ago, well, we've got a bit of an issue.
The best result is in the Vulkan-based run of RDR2, where the A380 is only a bit behind the RX 6400 and GTX 1650, hitting 59 fps at 1080p where the others manage 67 and 70 fps respectively. Still, a tough pill to swallow.
The testing machine
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