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It is through a rather laconic press release that Intel announces that it has launched its first desktop graphics card, the Arc A380. The flight of the series is for the moment only on the Chinese market, at a price of 153 €.
The Intel Arc A380 is the first desktop graphics card in the Arc Alchemist series. © Intel
Without fanfare, Intel launched its first desktop graphics card on the Chinese market. No specific event has been scheduled, as the news was announced through a fairly succinct press release. The opportunity, however, to learn a little more about this entry-level model.
The Arc A380 is based on the use of an ACM-G11 GPU consisting of 8 Xe Cores calculation blocks for a total of 1024 execution units. There are also XMX blocks for the acceleration of AI and XeSS operations (which are expected to arrive during the summer) as well as blocks dedicated to raytracing – without further details. The video engine supporting AV1 video decoding and encoding is also present. The base frequency is set at 2 GHz and the energy envelope limited to 75 watts, entry-level model requires. The chip is accompanied by 6 GB of GDDR6 graphics memory operating on a 96-bit bus for a memory bandwidth of only 192 GB / s.
The Intel Arc A380 is an entry-level graphics card with a fairly classic design. © Intel
The reference Arc A380 comes in the form of a short board of about twenty centimeters. The cooling system is classic with a large finned radiator surmounted by a single axial fan.
Intel also delivers a preview of video game performance, promising an experience “more fluid”. Overall, most popular competitive games would be playable at 70+ or even 100+ fps at Full HD (1080p) with graphics settings set to medium. Most of these games, however, are not very resource-intensive. Intel adds that this allows the A380 to be up to 25% faster than the Radeon RX 6400, the most entry-level card in AMD’s RX 6000 series.
“A smoother gaming experience”. The expected performance in 1080p “medium” in the games Doom Eternal, PUBG, Monster World, Apex, Fortnite, Overwatch, CS:GO, LoL and Dota 2. © Intel
The Intel Arc A380 graphics card would now be available on the Chinese market at a price of 1030 yuan including tax, which corresponds to €153 including tax. Intel’s press release specifies that for the time being, only its OEM partners are delivered, so as to integrate the card into complete PCs. The retail market will follow – again without details – but only in China. The rest of the world will be affected even later, during the summer, as we already indicated in a previous article.