Intel finally seems to have gotten some GPUs out in the market. The ARC A380 is the first card to have hit retail markets in China. The card is supported to come to the US sometime within the next few weeks. Initial reviews have started to drop in for the A380, and they are not quite promising.
The ARC A3 lineup will bring the lowest-end cards in the Alchemist lineup. It is meant for entry-level gaming. The A380 will be the higher-end budget GPU with an A350 and an A330 following up sometime in the future.
The ARC A380 will be priced anywhere between $129 and $139. At this price tag, this card can be perceived as a direct competitor to some entry-level GPUs like the older GeForce GTX 1650 and the Radeon RX 6400. However, Intel’s card falters and loses the performance metric to both of these GPUs.
Have a look at all of the benchmarks below.
It is not a losing game for the Intel ARC GPU. In some games like Naraka Bladepoint, Total War: Troy, and F1 2021, the card managed to beat similarly priced competitors from AMD and Nvidia. However, the Intel card cannot keep out in almost every other title. In some scenarios, the Intel GPU lags far behind the Nvidia and AMD offerings, making it a difficult recommendation. On average, the Intel card is about 15% slower as compared to the three-year-old GTX 1650 and about 8% slower than the recently introduced RX 6400.
The Intel ARC A380 seems to be a difficult crunch for gamers unless you are hellbound on getting an Intel GPU. If the same card would have been launched in Q1 2022, its initial release window, Intel could have estimated to sell a lot more units as gamers had been trying to get their hands on any card available in those times. But, now that the cards are available readily and are always in stock, recommending the ARC A380 for gaming purposes gets difficult.