Intel's First Arc Desktop Graphics Card Launches in China for $153
It’s not available in the US yet, but Intel’s first gaming desktop graphics card has arrived in China at the fairly affordable starting price of 1030 Chinese yuan, or $153.
On Wednesday, Intel launched(Opens in a new window) the Arc 380 GPU for the Chinese market and included some benchmarks, giving the public a preview of what the product has in store.
The A380 comes off as an entry-level card that’s been designed for gaming at 1080p. According to Intel, it delivers up to “25% better performance” per Chinese yuan when compared to AMD’s Radeon RX 6400 GPU, which also goes for around $160.
Those performance gains are based on Intel's own benchmarks comparing the two cards when running games at medium settings.
The big difference is that the A380 has 6GB of GDDR6 RAM compared to only 4GB in the RX 6400. For PC games—including Apex Legends, Fortnite and Overwatch—Intel’s card can average 101 frames per second, according to benchmarks on the company’s Chinese website(Opens in a new window). Meanwhile, for League of Legends and Dota 2, the FPS can reach 180 and 230, respectively.
That said, the 6GB of GDDR6 video RAM means the card is a step down from the 8GB you can find in Nvidia’s RTX 3050, a product that goes for $259 to $349.
Intel's A380 features eight Xe graphic cores, along with eight ray-tracing cores to enable realistic shadow and lighting effects in supported games. Like AMD's product, the card has a similar GPU base clock rate at 2000MHz, but it runs at a higher Thermal Design Power at 75 watts.
Intel’s China team also noted third-party vendors are developing their only custom A380 models that can feature faster clock speeds and a higher TDP. One of the vendors is Gunnir, which is preparing(Opens in a new
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