Intel Quietly Launches an Affordable Graphics Card, The Arc A580
It took a year, but Intel has finally launched the A380 graphics card, the last remaining product in the first-generation Arc desktop GPU family.
On Tuesday, the company began selling the A380 through its GPU partners ASRock, Gunnir and Sparkle with the prices starting at $179 on Newegg.
“The new product fills the middle of the Intel Arc discrete graphics product stack for gamers and creators, delivering advanced gaming performance at 1080p high settings,” Intel says.
The only problem is that the A580 is arriving quite late in the current Arc product cycle when the GPU family initially launched a year ago. In the meantime, rivals Nvidia and AMD have launched their own lower-end GPUs, such as the RTX 4060 and Radeon RX 7600, running newer architectures.
The other issue is that Intel has had to play catch up in optimizing the Arc GPUs for today's games. Still, the company says the A580 should appeal to consumers with its “competitive price.” The product also comes with 8GB of GDDR6 memory over a 256 bit memory interface.
“At 512 gigabytes per second, more than double the memory bandwidth of the closest competitors, Intel Arc A580-based add-in cards are equipped to smoothly run modern games,” the company added. (In contrast, the RTX 4060 starts at $299 while the Radeon RX 7600 can go for around $270.)
Stay tuned for our review of whether the A580 is worth a buy. But in the meantime, the pricing for Intel’s existing Arc cards has already fallen, making them even more of a bargain. For example, the lower-end Arc graphics card, the A380, can retail for as low as $99 on Newegg. Meanwhile, the Arc A750 is currently selling for $209, down from its original $289 price.
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