Intel crammed out its Arc graphics portfolio Tuesday with a $179 card aimed toward 1080p avid gamers on a shoestring funds.
The Arc A580 slots in between the x86 large’s entry-level A380 and mid-tier A700-series GPUs launched final yr. In reality, a look over the cardboard’s spec sheet reveals the A580 is basically a cutdown model of the A750.
Each playing cards function 8 GB of GDDR6, good for 512 GB/s of reminiscence bandwidth, however the lower-end card’s Xe graphics and ray-tracing models have been pared again from 28 to 24. Along with fewer cores, the A580s are additionally technically clocked slower at 1.7 GHz versus 2.05 GHz. Nonetheless, Intel notes that every one three of its launch companions — Asrock, Sparkle, and Gunnir — have overclocked their playing cards to 2 GHz.
The curbs do come on the benefit of a 40-watt-lower thermal design energy (TDP) at 185 watts in comparison with the 225 watts demanded by its extra highly effective siblings.
Intel’s Arc A580 GPU slots in betwen the entry-level A380 and mid-tier A750 – Click on to enlarge. Supply: Intel
By way of efficiency, Intel claims the cardboard is nice for 1080p 60-plus FPS gaming at high-quality settings in a wide range of titles. The chipmaker even confirmed charts the place the cardboard achieved 94FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider — a sport that is turn out to be a well-liked benchmark lately — with ray-traced shadows enabled and with out resorting to AI-upscaling trickery.
AI upscaling tech has turn out to be fairly fashionable lately amongst GPU distributors for extracting extra frames from much less highly effective GPUs. Nvidia has Deep Studying Tremendous Sampling (DLSS), AMD has FidelityFX Tremendous Decision, and Intel has Xe Tremendous Sampling (XeSS).
Every works roughly the identical through the use of numerous algorithms and machine studying strategies to improve low-res frames to 1080p or increased, permitting for increased body charges than would in any other case be potential. The GPU and sport engine kick out low-res frames at a cushty fee after which upscale them. Newer implementations by AMD and Nvidia go as far as utilizing ML to generate complete frames from beforehand drawn ones. This insertion of AI-made frames boosts the body fee.
In fact, sport builders must make the most of these applied sciences for all of it to work correctly, and Intel’s XeSS, maybe unsurprisingly, is not as effectively supported with 64 titles claimed. For comparability, AMD’s FSR boasts 139 titles and Nvidia’s DLSS claims 300-plus in all.
But when your sport does occur to assist XeSS, Intel claims avid gamers can count on as much as 63 p.c increased body charges when the function is enabled. In fact, with any vendor-supplied numbers, we advocate you’re taking these with a grain of salt.
Along with gaming, Intel additionally talked up the A580’s twin AV1 media decoders and encoders. AV1 is a comparatively new, royalty-free codec that is confirmed to be very house environment friendly. As we have mentioned beforehand, the codec is anyplace from 20 to 40 p.c extra environment friendly at compressing video in comparison with current codecs, like H.265.
With that mentioned, we suspect the Arc A580’s principal promoting level goes to be its value. Beginning at $179, the cardboard undercuts the market value of its “closest opponents” — the Nvidia RTX 3050 and AMD RX 6600 — by between $25-$50 at present numbers. ®
