Intel launches the ARC A380, its first $150 desktop graphics card
Intel has just launched its first desktop graphics card, the ARC A380, on the Chinese market. Offered around 150 €, this GPU will offer sufficient performance to run the most popular games at 1080p and 60 FPS. It will be launched during the summer in other countries.
While Nvidia has just postponed the launch of the GeForce RTX 4000 to July 2022, Intel is taking advantage of this free field to announce the arrival of its first desktop graphics card, ARC A380. A surprise announcement, since the manufacturer had multiplied the release reports, with a date now set for summer 2022.
Either way, the rumors weren’t entirely false. In effect, this new GPU will first debut in the Chinese market, before being offered for sale in other countries during the summer period. If we were to engage in the comparison game, Intel assures us that the ARC A380 will offer 25% higher performance to those of a Radeon RX 6400, AMD’s latest entry-level card.
Intel launches its 1st entry-level desktop GPU
In summary, it is above all an entry-level graphics card, which will allow gamers to enjoy the most popular titles in 1080p and 60 frames per second minimum. “Intel ARC A380 GPU supports the DirectX 12 Ultimate feature set, including hardware-accelerated Ray-Tracing, and delivers smooth 1080p gaming at 60fps and above with popular titles like League of Legends, Moonlight Blade, Naraka: BladePoint and PUBG: Battlegrounds”, assures Intel in its official press release.
Note that the ARC A308 mobilizes a ACM-G11 GPU, consisting of 8 Xe Cores compute blocks for a total of 1024 execution units. Note that blocks dedicated to Ray-Tracing are present, while a video engine supporting AV1 video decoding and encoding also answers the call. On the frequency side, it will take 2 GHz and a TBP of 75 W.
The chip also comes with 6 GB of GDDR6 graphics memory based on a 96-bit memory bus. This results in a bandwidth of 192 GB/s only. As said above, this is an entry-level GPU. In fact, the price will remain accessible: 1030 yuan, or €146 after conversion.
Regarding availability, Intel specifies that the ARC A380 “will be available from desktop ecosystem partners Acer, ASUS, Gigabyte, GUNNIR, HP and MSI starting this month. Commercialization will begin in China and expand globally over the summer”.
Source : VideoCardz
