Review – Intel Arc A380 Runs Fine on AMD Ryzen
At long last, here’s our first graphics card review in 15 years that covers a non-NVIDIA, non AMD discrete GPU, with the last one being 2008’s S3 Chrome-440 GTX.
The new Intel Arc A380 may be an entry a level graphics card, but carries the weight of the world on its shoulders for Intel Graphics. The new Arc call it “Alchemist” graphics card family is part of Intel’s first attempt to return to the gaming graphics space in over almost two decades.
The company’s last swing was “Larrabee” GPU, which is missed the bus with performance or price positioning, and was re-purposed as an HPC accelerator. With the new X-e HPG graphics architecture, Intel is pulling out all stops at developing a modern GPU all gamers would actually want. The entire lineup meets a DirectX-12 Ultimate requirements, including a real time of ray tracing.
The Intel Arc A-380 in today’s review is an entry-mainstream discrete graphics card that has the complete software feature set of X-e HPG. It’s positioned as a mainstream gaming product’s that have some serious creator chops in the form of accelerated AV1 video encoding.
Intel has a feature rivaling the DLSS and FSR, which it calls X-e SS (X-e Super Sampling), will letting you dial resolutions a notch above what this card is capable of playing at. Several popular like a e-sports titles should be playable at resolutions as high as Full-HD.
The “Alchemist” product’s development project, which is Intel will correctly calls an “Odyssey,” bore fruit in Q2 2022, with a debut in the notebook space, followed by a desktop debut with the A-380 the card we’re reviewing today.
Intel decided to sell their card to Chinese local market first before sell in other country. You can’t yet buy the A-380 in the US or Europe, but can probably import one from China, like we did. Intel has a selection of board partners such as AS-Rock, MSI and ASUS developing their custom design A380 graphics cards, but the one we have with us today, is the GUNNIR Photon Arc A-380, is a brand that’s been first to market with these cards in China.
A word on the nomenclature. Intel Graphics is the company’s division tasked with a development all of the company’s GPU-IP, including the I-GPUs found in the company’s processors. And the “X-e” architecture, which is debuted toward the end of the last decade, is a bottoms up graphics IP initiative designed to double graphics performance with each generation.