ASRock Intel Arc A380 Challenger ITX 6GB OC, 6GB DDR6, PCIe4, HDMI, 3 DP, 2250MHz Clock, 0dB Cooling, Compact Design

Product Information

This will be true for all Intel Arc A380 graphics cards for the time being. But if Intel keeps at the enormous effort that'll be required to get the drivers up to snuff, there is promise that these cards could one day be worthy buys. Not yet, though. I’ve been a tech enthusiast for as long as I can remember, and I don’t just say that due to a poor memory. My father was a techie, and I can remember wanting to learn all I can about computers from as young as the age of four or five. That part of me loves interesting and new tech products, even when they aren’t a winner out of the gate. And for that reason, part of me wants to love Intel’s Arc A380, and root for its successors to succeed. And look at the list of games: Age of Empires 4, Apex Legends, DOTA 2, GTAV, Naraka Bladepoint, NiZhan, PUBG, Warframe, The Witcher 3, and Wolfenstein Youngblood? Some of those are more than five years old, several are known to be pretty light in terms of requirements, and in general that's not a list of demanding titles. We get the idea of going after esports competitors, sort of, but wouldn't a serious esports gamer already have something more potent than a GTX 1650?

Intel has five different mobile SKUs, the A350M, A370M, A550M, A730M, and A770M. Those are understandably power constrained, while for desktops there will be (at least) A770, A750, A580, and A380 models. Intel also has Pro A40 and Pro A50 variants for professional markets (still using the smaller chip), and we can expect additional models for that market as well.This cookie is used to detect and defend when a client attempt to replay a cookie.This cookie manages the interaction with online bots and takes the appropriate actions. An Intel rep that we spoke to did go on record and stated that “We (Intel) are aware of these issues and are looking into them.” Hopefully this points to more promising results in the future with fewer crashes. This cookie is set by the provider Akamai Bot Manager. This cookie is used to manage the interaction with the online bots. It also helps in fraud preventions Obviously, gigaflops (or teraflops) on its own doesn't tell us everything, but nearly 17.2 TFLOPS for the top configurations is nothing to scoff at. Nvidia's Ampere GPUs still theoretically have a lot more compute. The RTX 3080, as an example, has a maximum of 29.8 TFLOPS, but some of that gets shared with INT32 calculations. AMD's RX 6800 XT by comparison 'only' has 20.7 TFLOPS, but in many games, it delivers similar performance to the RTX 3080. In other words, raw theoretical compute absolutely doesn't tell the whole story. Arc Alchemist could punch above — or below! — its theoretical weight class. The inclusion of Ray-Tracing hardware and AI components make Arc GPUs more advanced than anything you’ll find in the company’s IGP product offerings, and Intel has developed software to take advantage of these features. It has specialized tools for media transcoding with Arc GPUs, and similar to AMD’s FSR and Nvidia’s DLSS, Intel has a technology called XeSS for using AI to upscale games and boost performance. At this time, however, no games that you can buy support the XeSS feature, so we’re forced to proceed without testing it.

Gen Intel® Core™ processor family (Codename Raptor Lake-S, Raptor Lake-HX, Raptor Lake-H, Raptor Lake-P, Raptor Lake-U) Not only does the Arc A380 represent a return for budget graphics cards (something we haven’t seen much action in for several years now), but it also marks the first time in nearly 20 years that there’s been more than two truly viable options in the GPU space. It’s new, it's exciting, and I want to see more of that! For the entry-level and mobile parts, it's not just gaming performance that Intel is hyping up. Arc includes the Xe media engine, which supports up to 8K encode and decode of AVC (H.264), HEVC (H.265), VP9, and AV1 — and Arc is the only GPU right now with hardware encoding support of AV1. Comparing the A380 against a Core i5-12600K CPU encode of an AV1 video, the A380 took less than a quarter of the time (53 seconds versus 234 seconds).

Memory

These settings and others can be adjusted using Intel’s new Arc Control Center program. This program runs as an overlay when open, which prevented us from getting screenshots of it with our A770 card, but here's a look at the Performance section of the software, in use with the lower-end Arc A380...