A Chinese brand called Gunnir has revealed what looks to be the world's first custom Intel Arc graphics card: the Arc A380 Photon 6GB OC. And it looks like a doozy.
intel arc gpu
According to Tom's Hardware, the gaming GPU based on Intel's Alchemist architecture is actually the entry-level tier card and not one of Team Blue's higher-tier ones. As such, the rumored price of the card is set at a meager $150 MSRP, which then prompts folks to see what kind of hardware and performance it's packing for that price.
Here is an image of the Gunnir Arc A380 Photon 6GB OC, clearly showing a dual-fan, dual-slot cooler:
intel arc a380 gunnir
The specs on the custom Intel gaming GPU are as follows: eight Xe cores and ray tracing units, 4MB of L2 cache, 6GB of GDDR6 memory, and a boost clock of 2,450 MHz. The memory is clocked at 15.5 Gbps and comes with a small 96-bit bus, good enough for a 186 Gbps max memory bandwidth. Combine all of these and Gunnir says that the card could reach 5 TFLOPs of FP32 performance, which basically puts it in the same league as the NVIDIA GTX 1660 non-Ti.
But that performance, however, could very well be the result of the hefty factory overclock that Gunnir seems to have put here. That's because early reported benchmarks of the Intel Arc A380 on SiSoftware (via a different Tom's Hardware report) puts it on the same level as a GTX 1650 Super. In that benchmark, the A380 was said to be capable of 4.4 TFLOPs - slightly below what Gunnir claims.
VideoCardz shares a bit more detail about the new Intel card, alongside images of its packaging courtesy of the Chinese site Expreview. According to their report, the Arc A380 Photon OC requires a single 8-pin power connector, which coupled with its overclocked nature could mean a 92-watt total board power (TBP). To cap things off, the card has three DisplayPort connectors and a single HDMI 2.0, which is already a massive upgrade to other low-end GPUs like AMD's RX 6400.
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What Kind Of Gaming Experience Will The Intel Arc A380 Photon OC Provide?
There are no official benchmarks for the card yet, but the specs should give a vague idea of what you could expect from it in terms of performance.
Performance seems to be in-between a GTX 1650 Super and GTX 1660, which means that the Intel Arc A380 is more or less a 1080p card. Don't expect to max out modern games on it either. A mix of High or Medium graphics settings could be all the $150 SRP card can muster at 1080p resolution, give or take 50-60 FPS on average. So no 1440p or 4K gaming here, unless you're fine with Low settings at 30 FPS.
Here's a direct comparison between the 1650 Super and the 1660 from the YouTube channel Gentleman, giving you a visual clue of how the Arc A380 could perform in games:
As you can see there, performance in modern games is relatively smooth and good-looking. And if the card does retain a price close to its alleged MSRP of $150, then Intel is poised to introduce a true contender in the budget GPU market.
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This article is posted on GameNGuide
Written by Isabella James
