Without the slightest fanfare, a new graphics card has just joined Intel’s portfolio. The Arc A310 was made official last Wednesday (28) in a silent way — as it should work, after all, the hardware serves as the new entry-level option, bringing lower power and even simpler specifications than the Arc A380.
Arc A310 is equipped with an ACM-G11 GPU with TSMC’s 6 nanometer process. The graphics chip has 6 Xe cores for a total of 96 execution units (EUs). This platform works with 2.0GHz clock with the same 75W TBP as the Arc A380but reducing its amount of ray tracing cores to just 6.
With the cuts, the video card also loses in its memory capacity. The Arc A310 has only 4 GB of VRAM, 50% less than the Arc A380, so it is a direct rival to models like the AMD Radeon RX 6400 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1630. Its bus interface is 64-bit, totaling at 124 GB/s bandwidth.
The graphics card is limited to the 4th generation PCI Express standard at 16 lanes as listed by the Intel website. This is a peculiar feature, since the Arc A380 has support for only 8 tracks, which would make the new input option relatively faster in this regard. Anyway, GDDR6 modules are limited to 15.5 Gbps.
Other graphics card specs include its native DirectX 12 Ultimate support, a DisplayPort 1.4 port, a DisplayPort 2.0, an HDMI 2.1 and an HDMI 2.0b port.
The graphics card offers native encoding and decoding for AV1, H.264, H.265 and VP9, so it will give your computer a boost when producing videos and other content. It is possible to deduce that this application of the hardware will be much more productive and efficient than its use for processing games.
Intel has not yet confirmed the MSRP. of the Arc A310, but it is possible that it will be announced as a product from partner manufacturers soon. Its officialization follows the official launch of the Arc A770, the most advanced graphics card from the “blue team” that will be sold at a suggested price of US$ 329 (about R$ 1,779) starting on October 12.
