What simply occurred? Intel has introduced availability of its Arc A-series 3 desktop graphics playing cards in China, one of many first being a customized model of the Arc A380 from Chinese producer Gunnir. The entry-level product is priced at 1030 yuan (round $153), and Intel says it’s as much as 25% sooner than AMD’s bottom-of-the-stack Radeon RX 6400.
Gunnir’s dual-fan Arc A380 Photon 6GB OC packs Intel’s ACM-G11 GPU made on TSMC’s 6nm course of node. As the title suggests, it packs three 15.5 Gbps 2GB GDDR6 reminiscence modules and a 2,000 MHz base clock with a 2,450 MHz overclocked increase. While the reminiscence is slower than the 16 Gbps reference specs, this OC mannequin will possible have a better increase clock than the usual A380.
Other stats embody eight Xe cores, every with as much as 128 ALUs for a complete of 1,024 ALUs, eight ray tracing items, and 4MB of L2 cache. The Arc A380 Photon additionally packs three DisplayPort outputs and one HDMI 2.0 port, and the 92W TBP (complete board energy) score means it solely requires a single 8-pin PCIe energy connector.
Intel is positioning the Arc A380 as an inexpensive card that’s nonetheless able to passing 60 fps with medium settings in much less demanding video games like Apex Legends and Dota 2. It additionally notes that its Xe Media Engine allows {hardware} AV1 encoding acceleration whereas supporting HEVC, H.264 encode/decode, and 8K decision media processing. That ought to make it a extra attractive choice than the $160 Radeon RX 6400, which has a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface, no {hardware} encoding, and no AV1 decode.
Intel says different Arc A380 playing cards will come from Acer, ASUS, Gigabyte, HP, and MSI beginning this month. The launch will start in China and increase globally through the summer season, so count on to see the playing cards land within the US earlier than AMD’s Radeon RX 7000 and Nvidia’s RTX 4000 traces get right here.
