If only you could get a 1650S or 6400 at MSRP - Intel A380 reviews out

[williamcll]

Reviews for the Intel Arc 380 graphics card is out, performance wise it trade blows with the Radeon 6400 but falls short to the GTX 1650S which it claims to be competing against.

Quotes

Quote

Performance evaluations of A380, Intel’s so far slowest and fastest desktop Arc Alchemist graphics cards are now published. The embargo on performance reviews has lifted and multiple Chinese outlets have released their benchmark results. These reviews focus mainly on GUNNIR Arc A380 Photon OC graphics cards, which is an overclocked model with increased clocks and TDP. Furthermore, we have official data from Intel themselves, who are comparing their own card with GeForce GTX 1650 and Radeon RX 6400 graphics cards, both solutions are considered low-end. This data was shared by Wccftech. According to this data, the A380 is officially slower than both solutions in gaming workloads:

MyDrivers put A380 against GTX 1050 Ti model, which is soon to be replaced by GTX 1630. At least in this case A380 has a chance of being faster.

((From top to bottom: 3D Mark, 3D Mark Spy, Assassin's creed Valhalla, horizon: zero dawn, Age of Empires 4, far cry 5, far cry 6, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Forza Horizons 5, PUBG, Cyberpunk 2077, World of tanks, Witcher 3, Borderlands 3, Gears of War 5. The last is the performance difference between the A380))

Other sources have posted Emulator and Non-game performance: Be sure to turn on Vulkan whenever it appears

My thoughts

It's rather balanced in terms of game and work performance but the numbers aren't spectacular at all. If they can still to MSRP then it should remain competitive.

There's also the issue of drivers, will intel not mess up their programming like the early days of the Xe?

 

Sources

https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-arc-a380-officially-debuts-in-china-its-slower-and-more-expensive-than-radeon-rx-6400

https://news.mydrivers.com/1/841/841169_all.htm

https://www.expreview.com/83796.html

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1dt4y1h76D

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1bg411X75D

[jaslion]

Even today xe drivers are a mess. Still a lot of issues especially with older software. Its a lot better but not good enough yet.

 

Seems this is a slightly souped up 1050ti replacement more than anything.

[JKRsega]

It's a steaming pile of poop.  Don't use it on AMD as it doesn't like AMD. 

[venomtail]

Intel can't afford an early adopters tax right now, infract it needs the opposite. An early adopters discount. If it was max £100 while trading blows with the RX6400 which nearly costs around £180. Half price and Intel would definitely have a chance

[Sauron]

Not too bad for a debut card, I'd expect it to improve significantly as drivers and games are optimized. Definitely not something I'd recommend to someone who just needs a  cheap card

[Rauten]

According to the VideoCardz article, the street price is higher than both it's MSRP and  the streetprice for the RX6400?!

Intel, what the hell are you smoking?

[Vishera]

5 minutes ago, Rauten said:

Intel, what the hell are you smoking?

Intel decided on the pricing when the GPU shortage was ongoing and prices were significantly higher.

So it's possible that the Article on VideoCardz has outdated information or that Intel didn't adjust the pricing to the current market,

[porina]

1 hour ago, Rauten said:

According to the VideoCardz article, the street price is higher than both it's MSRP and  the streetprice for the RX6400?!

Intel, what the hell are you smoking?

Like most of the civilised world China list pricing includes tax, currently at 17%. The MSRP of 1030 CNY is effectively 880 CNY without, or US$132. RX 6400 US MSRP seems to be $160 so Intel are targeting below that. I couldn't find a CN MSRP for comparison and there can be country to country variations.

 

Street pricing will do what it does. This is down to the sellers not Intel. Have people really forgotten that there's often a price spike when a new product comes out? After the initial interest is over it will find its real market position, and that's we should look out for. 6400 being older will have long reached that point. For Intel, we'll have to wait perhaps some weeks for it to settle down.

[cmndr]

As others hinted at - drivers have a LONG way to go.

This is a decent start. It will take Intel a LONG time to get GOOD drivers and to fine tune their architecture. There is potential.

[TetraSky]

Well, there goes my dreams of a third competitor... 

[BiG StroOnZ]

[Likwid]

I dunno about comparisons, in where I live rx 6400 and 6500 xt both cost 175 eur

[BiG StroOnZ]

Here's Intel's Provided Benchmarks for the Arc A380:

 

 

Quote

Intel recently shared performance metrics of its new Arc A380 desktop GPU in 17 gaming titles, with direct comparisons to the GTX 1650 and RX 6400 — which were all tested on the same PC. On average, the A380 lost in comparison to the GTX 1650 and RX 6400.

 

On average, the Arc A380 lost to the GTX 1650 by 19% and lost to the RX 6400 by 9%. When we compare each GPU on a game-by-game basis, the Arc A380 only beats the RX 6400 in four of the 17 titles and beats the GTX 1650 in one of them (Naraka Bladepoint). There's also a three-way tie in NiZhan, where all the GPUs managed 200 fps, though we're not sure why Intel would even bother to include that particular benchmark since it looks like there's a frame rate cap.

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/a380-outperformed-by-gtx-1650-rx-6400

[WhitetailAni]

Ah yes, I love playing games on my Airbus A380.

[Quackers101]

so it might not be long for the A750 leaks for their bigger and a bit more gaming GPUs. Sadly they will be so much variation per game that it's hard to recommend any for gaming specificly. Although it might be fine at times.

 

intel + Gamer Nexus, and some explaining more on some of their choices.

 

Also that ReBar ON had a lot of going on for intel GPU's and their deep link with intel CPUs.

Which is something to get a bit more into.

[Rauten]

10 hours ago, Quackers101 said:

Also that ReBar ON had a lot of going on for intel GPU's and their deep link with intel CPUs.

Which is something to get a bit more into.

I like this decision by Intel in general, but it does leave the A380 and budget gamers using older systems left to dry.

 

They knew they were going to enter the market after ReBAR was available to the public, so they focused on creating GPUs that could really use it. To hell with non-ReBAR systems, those are in the past.
It allows them to create a microarchitecture based on current technology, with no "baggage", and clearly different from what the competition offers.

 

But it does mean the A380 has a very small market. The vast majority of people that could possibly want it are people on older systems that don't have ReBAR that could look at the low price for it and think "this could be a nice drop-in" -- even more so since it can be fed by the PCIe slot alone.

 

I like that in that video, Intel came out and confirmed that their intended MSRP for the card is around 130$~140$.

[porina]

1 hour ago, Rauten said:

I like this decision by Intel in general, but it does leave the A380 and budget gamers using older systems left to dry.

 

They knew they were going to enter the market after ReBAR was available to the public, so they focused on creating GPUs that could really use it. To hell with non-ReBAR systems, those are in the past.

ReBAR is supported back several generations. I'm finding it a little hard to get exact details, but for example, AMD on AMD support goes back to Ryzen 3000 series with 500 chipset (3 years ago), and nvidia on Intel support goes back to 10th gen Comet Lake (2 years ago). I guess it would be nice if support went back to AMD 400 chipset and Intel Coffee Lake as they're still potent systems for gaming today, with a reasonable GPU. Offsetting that, I gut feel is that new GPU upgrade sales make a relatively small part of the dGPU market compared to combined DIY new builds and prebuilts.

 

On the assumption that ReBAR isn't a hard requirement, the question then becomes how big a perf difference are we looking at with/without it? Even with some hit, it will be compared to the competition who also have some level of impact with/without it. Actually, that's an interesting point. Are there content creators out there will using older systems for test to show this?

 

[Rauten]

8 minutes ago, porina said:

On the assumption that ReBAR isn't a hard requirement, the question then becomes how big a perf difference are we looking at with/without it? Even with some hit, it will be compared to the competition who also have some level of impact with/without it. Actually, that's an interesting point. Are there content creators out there will using older systems for test to show this?

GN has a review of the A380 up.

 

Their conclusion is, "don't even bother without ReBAR" -- it very much looks like their architecture depends on ReBAR, some games that are playable with it enable become horrendous without it.

[porina]

30 minutes ago, Rauten said:

Their conclusion is, "don't even bother without ReBAR" -- it very much looks like their architecture depends on ReBAR, some games that are playable with it enable become horrendous without it.

Thanks, will look it up later.

 

Forgot to say, I did find it interesting in the video linked a few posts up Intel said Arc performs generally as expected on current APIs like DX12 and Vulcan, but needs more work on older games using DX9, DX11. I had kinda wondered if that was the case as there were hints of something like that going on when we got the early leaked results.

[Zodiark1593]

On 6/23/2022 at 6:03 AM, jaslion said:

Even today xe drivers are a mess. Still a lot of issues especially with older software. Its a lot better but not good enough yet.

 

Seems this is a slightly souped up 1050ti replacement more than anything.

Yeah, I do agree. Far and away much better than what we got years ago, but still prone to issues with certain titles, disappointingly, including my favorite game, Final Fantasy XII (Zodiac Age), which is a shame because when it runs, it does so quite nicely. Just the crashes ruin it. 
 

Intel has a really strong GPU architecture that doesn’t need a ton of bandwidth to thrive. Intel really needs to focus on drivers, and then maybe put forward some more aggressive designs. Drivers do need to come before chasing performance though. All the performance in the world is pretty useless when people’s favorite games are prone to crashing. 

[Rauten]

1 hour ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Intel has a really strong GPU architecture that doesn’t need a ton of bandwidth to thrive.

Huh, my takeaway from the GN videos was actually quite the opposite, specially the piece where they're talking with the Intel engineer.

To my (plebeian) understanding, it sounded like they do actually want as wide a connection as possible, directly to system memory, to feed their cards. It's just that the A380 is a low power card and therefore it doesn't need that much. And even then, it's still a 4.0x8 connection which is very respectable.

 

Why do you say that they don't need that much bandwidth?

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, porina said:

On the assumption that ReBAR isn't a hard requirement, the question then becomes how big a perf difference are we looking at with/without it? Even with some hit, it will be compared to the competition who also have some level of impact with/without it. Actually, that's an interesting point. Are there content creators out there will using older systems for test to show this?

A380 without ReBAR is unusable/unplayable due to frame time spikes to the degree that it is legitimately unacceptable. It's that bad sadly.

[Zodiark1593]

3 hours ago, Rauten said:

Why do you say that they don't need that much bandwidth?

The integrated part does yield surprisingly good performance despite being limited by slow system DDR4 (in my case, it’s measured at a pokey 40 GB/s). Doom in particular, was pretty mind blowing to see running quite well on integrated hardware with visual settings about on par with the Playstation 4.
 

It’s quite remarkable to see what can be squeezed out of so little bandwidth. Heavy alpha effects are no longer the death of framerates for integrated, and shadow mapping (albeit at reduced settings) are actually doable. 

[porina]

56 minutes ago, leadeater said:

A380 without ReBAR is unusable/unplayable due to frame time spikes to the degree that it is legitimately unacceptable. It's that bad sadly.

I have since caught up with that video, and yeah, those spikes without rebar aren't acceptable for gaming. If they can be resolved by driver fixes before mass western release, then even with the perf gap in performance with rebar, it would be usable at least. I did enter their earlier scavenger hunt and while I didn't score a free GPU, in theory I do have a discount voucher still waiting for me. Getting a lower end card discounted could still be interesting to play with. My test system is Coffee Lake vintage, so no rebar. 

[Quackers101]

750 intel