Perhaps Intel's desktop Arc GPUs aren't as amazing as they were cranked out to be, based on these early benchmarks of the currently China-only Arc A380 graphics card.
intel arc gpu
As reported by VideoCardz.com, the budget desktop gaming GPU from Team Blue proved to be quite slower than even AMD's reviled RX 6400 at 1080p. Its numbers in synthetic benchmarks including 3DMark Port Royal (ray tracing) and Time Spy aren't great either - though that's where it kind of outperformed AMD's budget GPU.
The gaming tests included League Of Legends, PUBG, and Tomb Raider - all easy-to-run titles at 1080p. But Forza Horizon 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 upped the ante by a significant margin by the end of the tests. It was never able to surpass the RX 6400 in all gaming tests, and was only able to come close to the GTX 1650.
In the synthetic benchmarks, the Intel Arc A380 did score 947 points in the Port Royal ray tracing test - meaning that it does have a bit of RT performance in. However, it absolutely gets destroyed by the NVIDIA RTX 3050, which scored a whopping 3534 points in comparison. The RX 6400, as expected, scored just over half that of the A380 Arc GPU at 552 points.
3DMark Time Spy is where the A380 competed well enough, outperforming the 1650, 6400, and even the 6500 XT by scoring 5170. But the thing is, these benchmarks didn't even share the kind of graphics settings they were at - so it's quite possible that the Chinese AIB company, Gunnir, might've skewed it to favor the card and help sell it.
Either way, these benchmarks are not doing Intel any good if they really want to cut into NVIDIA and AMD's decades-long dominance of the graphics card market. If proven accurate, then the performance of the card is far below what it's been hyped at. Granted, the A380 is a budget card and not supposed to be a top performer at all. But falling behind even the measly RX 6400 is not a good look for Team Blue.
Read Also: Final Fantasy 16 Will NOT Be Open-World, Confirms Producer
More Alleged Embellishments From Intel?
The YouTube channel called Techfluencer recently released a video about the Intel Arc A380 desktop GPU, which the company reportedly markets as "up to 25% faster" than the AMD RX 6400 in terms of performance per Yuan (since it's only out in China at the moment). But after an analysis, it was revealed that the performance per Yuan uplift is actually just around 4%.
Here is the video if you want to watch it in its entirety:
Another report from VideoCardz also says that even the higher-tier cards in Intel's Arc Alchemist lineup may also be far slower than initially expected. Judging from the analysis of the A380, the highest-tier card in the series (Arc A780) may be just slightly slower than an RTX 3060 Ti - not as fast as the 3070 as initially proclaimed.
Down the ladder, everything else is just projected slower. The A770 is now in between a 3060 Ti and a 3060 (initially projected as equivalent to a 3060 Ti); the A750 is now expected to be slightly worse than a 3060; the A580 is now "at best" equal to a RTX 3050 (originally projected to be RX 6600 non-XT tier), and the super-budget A310 doesn't even come close to the RX 6400, which is its projected direct competitor.
Intel's got some serious explaining to do.
Related Article: Graphics Card Specs 101: The Most Important Ones EXPLAINED
This article is posted on GameNGuide
Written by RJ Pierce