Intel Arc A380

[W1zzard]

Intel Arc A380 is the first graphics card that the Blue Team is releasing this year. It's based on the new Xe "Alchemist" architecture, which includes support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing. In our in-depth review of the A380 we check rasterization performance, RT performance, power, heat, noise, on an AMD Ryzen platform.

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[ZetZet]

Very good, almost matches my 1060 3GB 4 years later for the same amount of money.


But seriously, who is this card for? It's shit value for gaming, it's too expensive to just be a display expansion card...

 

[ZoneDymo]

That RT performance is honestly pretty impressive, looking forward to see what the A770 will be like

 

[ZetZet]

That RT performance is honestly pretty impressive, looking forward to see what the A770 will be like

I don't know if I would use the word impressive, it's either matching or losing to Nvidia 3xxx series cards. AMD supposedly got close to Nvidia with RDNA3 too, of course we will have to see. But it's just okay, especially since Intel had all the advantage of designing their cards around RT, instead of having to slap it on like AMD did without much time.

 

[ZeppMan217]

A beta version of a GPU. What a time to be not dead.

 

[ZoneDymo]

I don't know if I would use the word impressive, it's either matching or losing to Nvidia 3xxx series cards. AMD supposedly got close to Nvidia with RDNA3 too, of course we will have to see. But it's just okay, especially since Intel had all the advantage of designing their cards around RT, instead of having to slap it on like AMD did without much time.

Yeah but this is also such a weak card that no gamer should get, so when we get the A750 and A770, im expecting those to do relatively well there, which is good enough .

 

[R0H1T]

Slightly impressed in some of the areas like power consumption, temp/heat & noise especially but a lot of others were a letdown including that awful hit die to rebar!

That RT performance is honestly pretty impressive, looking forward to see what the A770 will be like

You mean that performance only marginally better than an XP slideshow with RT on

Yeah but this is also such a weak card that no gamer should get, so when we get the A750 and A770, im expecting those to do relatively well there, which is good enough .

I'm still hoping RT dies some unnatural death & we get something much less taxing/efficient maybe with a hybrid RT+raster approach completely "revolutionizing" gaming.

 

[Bruno_O]

HTPC card I guess... would rather get a 5600G for that actually

 

[R0H1T]

It's definitely much better than that.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

But seriously, who is this card for? It's shit value for gaming, it's too expensive to just be a display expansion card...

I guess thats why they limited the distribution to China only, Its their testing ground. Of course you'll eventually be able to buy one off ebay or aliexpress. Even if Intel banned the sale of it to overseas customers, It will still make it overseas by other means eventually one way or another.

 

[ir_cow]

But seriously, who is this card for? It's shit value for gaming, it's too expensive to just be a display expansion card...

China Internet Café.

Add in AV1 and H.265 encoding, its nice little capture offloader for OBS.

 

[Lew Zealand]

It's a 'good enough' first try for Intel in the modern GPU world and hopefully more competition works as it's supposed to for all us consumers. If the A770 and other big brothers can work similarly well and settle on a good price, maybe they'll sell with improved drivers.

Or wait until "B"attlemage or "C"attlemage or whatever's next.

 

[chrcoluk]

Does it beat 6400 on pcie3?

 

[GreiverBlade]

mmhh color me impressed ... if there is a LP variant (if the consumption was lower and the performance gap was larger)it would be a nice option over a RX 6400, also if it was not more than 180chf (which is the price of a Sapphire RX 6400 4gb )
RT @1080p is interesting on a budget gpu

my current "HTPC" use a i7-3770 thus the IGP is not the strongest (hence why i use my ridiculous GT 730 silent 2gb (ddr3) for now )

although... SERIOUSLY? it use a 8pin?
yep quite impressed for a "first" but that power consumption and the 8pin is ... a bit odd, given the small performance marging over a 6500 4gb @1080p

 

[Lew Zealand]

Does it beat 6400 on pcie3?

Not likely as no ReBAR on PCIe3 and the frametimes will be awful to deal with. Which is too bad as one target market for low end GPUs is older computers. The 6400 is at least still competent on PCIe3 as it's less bottlenecked than the 6500XT by simply being a lower performance part on the same bus. The 1650 is a better option if you can find it for a decent price.

 

[Fourstaff]

Good attempt, but plenty of work in front of them. I wonder if Intel has the stamina to fund tens of billions in order to close the gap with AMD/Nvidia, or are they going to give up soon after.

 

[trsttte]

@W1zzard on the second page you mention typical A380 should have 2 DP + 2 HDMI ports but this one has 3 DP + 1 HDMI, typo maybe? (from what i've seen at least only gigabyte sometimes does the 2+2 instead of 3+1). Also regarding the price, Ryan Shrout and Tom Petersen mentioned on gamers nexus a price of 130$ (129$ to 139$ which Steve nuked with something like "130$ without marketing lingo").

Also any chance for you could do a couple tests with DxVK for some DX11/DX9 games to see if it improves things?

Does it beat 6400 on pcie3?

Probably, this has 8 lanes and more ram (both quantity and bandwith).

SERIOUSLY? it use a 8pin?

I think it's better than a 6pin, most PSU come with 6+2 connectors (leaving you with a 2pin connector dangling if it was a 6pin connector on the gpu) and i'd wager the gpu might even work with a regular 6pin connector anyway since it's such a low power card

 

[asdkj1740]

remarkable review!

it really doesnt matter how much is the real msrp for us, the actual prices right now in china are simply way higher for an entry level model, unless intel would be able to "control" precisely the market price later.

 

[cellar door]

Linus said on the wan show that these ARC gpus look like a complete dumpster fire - and now I'm disappointed because I was hoping for them to bring some proper competition to the gpu market.

 

[AusWolf]

That RT performance is honestly pretty impressive, looking forward to see what the A770 will be like

Exactly my thoughts, considering that the card performs at 6400 levels, but completely destroys even the 6500 XT in raytracing (which isn't hard, but still).

 

[ModEl4]

Good overall showing.
Matched my optimistic performance scenario.
This means that a 2.5GHz A770 will be at RTX 3060Ti performance level which is a very good thing.
We just need better cards (ASRock Phantom Gaming A770? ≤$399 and 3060Ti performance class not very suitable for Taichi and Formula brands I guess) and of course more importantly Intel to improve drivers/software.
Raytracing was a huge win for ARC architecture. Slightly slower than Ampere and much better than RDNA2 (let's hope XeSS to be close to DLSS also)

 

[mplayerMuPDF]

Very good, almost matches my 1060 3GB 4 years later for the same amount of money.


But seriously, who is this card for? It's shit value for gaming, it's too expensive to just be a display expansion card...

It is for Linux users But seriously, it will be amazing on Linux. Intel drivers for Linux are very good. Furthermore, it does not matter that the (Windows) driver has poor support for DX11 and below because you will just use DXVK and Zink on Linux. GPGPU (OpenCL) support will probably be good on Linux too unlike with AMD Radeon. Aside from that it has AV1 decoding support and Intel GPUs are well-supported with VAAPI hardware video acceleration on Linux and now that hardware video acceleration works in browsers too finally on Linux, you will be able to watch YouTube in AV1 format without wasting electricity and hearing the fan in your laptop/desktop.

 

[GoldenX]

RT performance is amazing considering it was going against 2x faster Nvidia GPUs with 3x times the memory bandwidth.
Still, what I expected since this Arc thing started, Intel takes ages to optimize drivers.

 

[Garrus]

Frankly the performance is staggeringly bad. $100 fine, but not at MSRP. We should be easily beating the 1660 Super in 2022.... everything slower is terrible, I'd buy used.

 

[joemama]

To be fair, though the performance is bad, it's quite impressive as it is a first generation graphics card from Intel