The first media evaluations of Intel's Arc A380 reveal that it is a trainwreck. Intel never seeded any sample, but just made the product available in China, some websites have gotten their hands on a product. And they're not happy.
We'll go by the way of Germany based ComputerBase, The GPU is clashing with AMD's RX 6400 and NVIDIA's GTX 1650. The driver is also a "construction site," the critic notes. The graphical difficulties necessitate several restarts.
Gaming with Intel’s Arc A380, even with the latest driver, is like living in the middle of a minefield – mind you, playing while drunk. There is no other way to describe the past working days with the Arc A380. You don’t even know where to start. In its current state, it is completely incomprehensible how a large and reputable company like Intel can sell such a product to even a single customer.
In addition, the Arc A380 likes to struggle with stuttering in games that, for example, make Fortnite unplayable despite sufficient FPS. There are a few other titles that suffer from the problem, The Witcher 3, for example, does not run smoothly either. However, frame pacing is generally still a decent job in everyday life with the Intel Arc A380, many games show minor to major problems.
— Wolfgang Andermahr, ComputerBase
As it seems the product is a mess ... is rBAR dependent; on top of that, Arc 380 drivers do not support ReBar on AMD's Ryzen CPUs; the functionality only works with this technology on Intel's own processors. Then it offers bad frametime stutters combined with low-performance and high energy consumption. Outside of China, Intel Arc A380 graphics cards are not currently available for purchase. Arc Alchemist architecture will not be accessible for DIY clients in other locations, according to the business. Below are a couple of screenshots with results courtesy of computer base, as well as a frame time plot from Golem where you can read up on the content.
| Geforce GTX 1650 | Arc A380 | RX 6400 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| chip | TU117 (partially activated) | ACM-G11 (full expansion) | Navi 24 (partially activated) |
| production | TSMC 12FF (DUV) | TSMC N6 (EUV) | TSMC N6 (EUV) |
| transistors/area | 4.7 billion @ 200 mm² | 7.2 billion @ 157 mm² | 5.4 billion @ 107 mm² |
| shaders | 896 (14 SMS) | 1,024 (8 XeCs) | 768 (12 CUs) |
| TMU's | 56 | 64 | 48 |
| Ray Units | no | 8th | 12 |
| GPU clock | 1485/1665MHz | 2,000MHz | 2039/2321MHz |
| video memory | 4 GB GDDR5 | 6 GB GDDR6 | 4 GB GDDR6 |
| interface | 128 bits @ 8 Gbps | 96 bits @ 15.5 Gbps | 64 bits @ 16 Gbps |
| bandwidth | 128 GB/s | 186 GB/s | 128 GB/s + 0.46 TB/s |
| ROPs | 32 | 16 | 32 |
| L2 cache | 1 MB | 4 MB | 1 MB |
| board power | 75 watts | 75-87 watts | 53 watts |
| PCIe | Gen3 x16 | Gen4 x8 | Gen4 x4 |
Intel Arc A380 is plagued with software flaws, poor framerates and often unplayable
