If you’ve been waiting for the first generation of Intel graphics chips to come out, it’s time to stop hoping for the arrival of the third player. It’s unclear what this is all about. Maybe it’s the lack of experience playing against the blues, or maybe the problem is the inability to write the right software, we don’t know exactly. But the fact that the release has been delayed for a long time, causes mixed feelings. At the beginning it seemed that everything will be fine, and the reason is the lack of enough graphics chips, but time went by, NVIDIA and AMD managed to saturate the market with graphics cards, and Intel is still not on the horizon. We have to admit that it seems so easy to enter a market which has been developing for more than 25 years, squeezing out the key players. In fact, it is necessary to study the experience of dozens of generations, and then manage to catch up with the competitors in one generation.
Judging by the new tests, the burden turned out to be unbearable for Intel. Recall that the Arc A380 graphics card should go on sale in China for 1030 yuan, which corresponds to $153. It has 6 GB of video memory and runs on a 96-bit bus. During the presentation we were told that it beats the budget Radeon RX 6400 by 20%, but only yesterday the first graphics card was in the hands of enthusiasts who broke Intel’s claims. As you can see in the image below, there are no new games in the list for the test, so it’s hard to guess what kind of frames we would see in the same Cyberpunk 2077.
We’ll dispense with a detailed breakdown of the flights by game, because this can be done by each of our readers on their own. Since the names are given in Chinese, we will write the sequence on the screenshots.
- League of Legends
- Forza Horizon 5
- Grand Theft Auto V
- PUBG
- Red Dead Redemption
- Tomb Raider
As you can see, in some games the gap between Arc A380 and Radeon RX 6400 does not exceed 10%, while on average it reaches an impressive 20%. All this means that the first Intel video card has critically low performance figures. Perhaps something can be improved with software, but so far everything looks too unconvincing. Keep in mind that the Radeon RX 6400 is already selling in the EU below the recommended price, and for the Arc A380 they ask from $300 at retail. This means that Intel’s plans to take some significant share in the video card market may not succeed.
While we were preparing this material, tests of another blue team graphics card came up: the Arc A550M. It’s a representative of the mid-price segment with 8 GB of video memory running on a 128-bit bus. The tests took place in the popular Aztec Ruins High Tier package at 4K resolution. The final score was recorded at 3,979 frames, which corresponds to 62 frames per second. This time there is both good and bad news. So, the results were on par with the GeForce RTX 3050 and Radeon RX 590, as you can find out from the table. This is very good, as it will allow positioning this graphics card in the gaming segment for not the most expensive laptops. But there is a big spoonful of bad news. The fact is that there is not even an approximate timeline for the appearance of this graphics card. This means that it certainly will not come out in the next few months, and maybe even the end of the year. Only there on the market may arrive laptops based on next-generation graphics chips, which will be much faster, which means that the real chance to gain a foothold in the gaming segment with Intel is becoming less every day. Clearly, a lot is decided by the final cost, but we very much doubt that the blues will dare to dump it. They already lost a lot of time, and early expectations relied on extremely high prices for video cards, while today it is clear that the high margin will have to be abandoned.