Wednesday, June 22nd 2022
Intel Arc A380 Desktop GPU Does Worse in Actual Gaming than Synthetic Benchmarks
Intel's Arc A380 desktop graphics card is generally available in China, and real-world gaming benchmarks of the cards by independent media paint a vastly different picture than what we've been led on by synthetic benchmarks. The entry-mainstream graphics card, being sold under the equivalent of $160 in China, is shown beating the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 in 3DMark Port Royal and Time Spy benchmarks by a significant margin. The gaming results see it lose to even the RX 6400 in each of the six games tested by the source.
The tests in the graph below are in the order: League of Legends, PUBG, GTA V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Forza Horizon 5, and Red Dead Redemption 2. We see that in the first three tests that are based on DirectX 11, the A380 is 22 to 26 percent slower than an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, and Radeon RX 6400. The gap narrows in DirectX 12 titles SoTR and Forza 5, where it's within 10% slower than the two cards. The card's best showing, is in the Vulkan-powered RDR 2, where it's 7% slower than the GTX 1650, and 9% behind the RX 6400. The RX 6500 XT would perform in a different league. With these numbers, and given that GPU prices are cooling down in the wake of the cryptocalypse 2022, we're not entirely sure what Intel is trying to sell at $160.
Sources:
Shenmedounengce (Bilibili), VideoCardz
The tests in the graph below are in the order: League of Legends, PUBG, GTA V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Forza Horizon 5, and Red Dead Redemption 2. We see that in the first three tests that are based on DirectX 11, the A380 is 22 to 26 percent slower than an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, and Radeon RX 6400. The gap narrows in DirectX 12 titles SoTR and Forza 5, where it's within 10% slower than the two cards. The card's best showing, is in the Vulkan-powered RDR 2, where it's 7% slower than the GTX 1650, and 9% behind the RX 6400. The RX 6500 XT would perform in a different league. With these numbers, and given that GPU prices are cooling down in the wake of the cryptocalypse 2022, we're not entirely sure what Intel is trying to sell at $160.
190 Comments on Intel Arc A380 Desktop GPU Does Worse in Actual Gaming than Synthetic Benchmarks
And there's those that will pick on everything as long as they can say something bad about Intel. But that's just childish.
I personally can play games at 30fps and not consider it the end of the world, dont care about the latency nonsense, as is probably the case with millions of people.
If it sells well its a successful product, if it doesnt its a dud, thats all business will care about.
if not than why we have the grain of salt, spoon...or hill.... :laugh:
For example, it makes sense to measure height, width and depth to determine the volume of a room. The same "synthetics" are less useful when applied to something more complicated, like Sagrada Familia. Not meaningless, just less useful to give you an overall idea.
There are basically two ways to optimize for specific hardware; (these principles hold true to CPUs as well)
1) Using hardware-specific low-level API calls or instructions. (the few examples in games you will find of this will be to give extra eye-candy, not to give better performance)
2) Writing code where the code is carefully crafted to give an edge to a specific class of hardware. You will struggle to find examples of this being done intentionally. And even attempting to write code this way would be stupid, as the resource advantages of current gen. GPUs are likely to change a lot 1-2 generations down the road, and the competition is likely going to respond to any such advantage. So writing code that would give e.g. Nvidia an advantage years from now will be very hard, and could just as easily backfire and do the opposite. For these reasons this is never done, and the few examples where you see a clear advantage it's probably the result of the opposite effect; un-optimized code running into a hardware bottleneck. And as mentioned, most games today use generic or abstracted game engines, have very little if any low-level code, and are generally not optimized at all.
As a good example, a while ago I got to test some code that I had optimized on Sandy Bridge/Haswell/Skylake hardware for years on a Zen 3, and to my delight the optimizations showed even greater gains on AMD hardware, with the greatest example showing roughly double performance on Zen 3 vs. 5-10% on Intel hardware.
So this would mean that I either have supernatural powers to optimize for hardware that I didn't yet have my hands on, or you just don't understand how software optimizations work at all! ;)
In reality, games "optimized" for Nvidia or AMD is a myth.
It also tends to be reviewed possitively by the customers who bought the GPU. Personally I happen to like the rx6400 even better. Since it can be used on just the PCIE power. And again it has no equal in Nvidia nor Intel flavors. I feel like people miss this last part for some reason. Navi24 has no competition.
See I'm sure he's laughing all the way to the bank
More amazing is this thread was created yesterday and is on page 5 :laugh:
Why wouldn't GPU vendors allow us to play at 30-35 frames at 1080p with Ultra ray tracing quality lighting and reflections ?
NVIDIA is about to release the GTX 1630 to compete at this ultra budget segment, and it has most of Navi 24's issues rectified, namely, poor media handling (and no encoding capabilities). They can also tap the GA107 processor used only in laptops if needed. The RTX 3050's mobile variant is an incredibly capable GPU, I might add.
Still, the 1050 (Ti) and the 6400 / 6500 XT duo are in entirely different leagues, and should not be compared. The 1650 and 1650 Super are their main competition.
Anyway, I think people should at least be happy that the A380 will, one way or another, at least probably lower the pricing of the RX 6400. Personally, I do not have the money to buy a new GPU right now but it will be nice to know that there are at least some good (low-end, efficient & PCIe-power-only) options available that I can purchase if I need/want to.