A $179 Graphics Card for 1080p Gaming

When Intel unveiled its vary of Arc A-series desktop graphics playing cards final yr, it launched 4 fashions: the Arc A770, Arc A750, Arc A580, and Arc A380. Nonetheless, the Arc A580, which makes use of a cut-down ACM-G10 GPU, by no means reached the marketplace for causes that stay unclear. On Tuesday Intel lastly fleshed out the Arc desktop lineup with a 500 collection card, formally and instantly launching the Arc A580 graphics card.

Intel’s Arc A580 relies on the Alchemist ACM-G10 graphics processor with 3072 stream processors and that’s paired with 8 GB of reminiscence utilizing a 256-bit interface. Whereas the the cut-down GPU has fewer SPs than its higher-performing counterparts, it retains the entire options that the Alchemist structure has to supply, together with world-class media playback capabilities, together with {hardware} accelerated decoding and encoding in AV1, H.264, and H.265 codecs.

The cardboard sits beneath the Arc A770 and Arc A750 when it comes to efficiency, however above the Arc A380, thus focusing on avid gamers in price range. Intel itself positions its Arc A580 for 1080p gaming towards AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 and NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3050 graphics playing cards which have been out there available on the market for about two-and-a-half years.

When in comparison with its rivals, the Arc A580 has larger compute efficiency (10.445 FP32 TFLOPS vs. Radeon RX 6600’s 9 FP32 TFLOPS and GeForce RTX 3050’s 8 FP32 TFLOPS) in addition to dramatically larger reminiscence bandwidth (512 GB/s vs. 224 GB/s). Although as FLOPS should not every thing, we’ll should see how benchmarks play out. The most important benefit for Intel proper now could be going to be reminiscence bandwidth, as Intel is transport a card with a far wider reminiscence bus than anything on this class – one thing that AMD and NVIDIA shied away from after a number of cryptocurrency rushes and crashes.

However Intel’s Arc A580 is extra energy hungry than its rivals: as this half relies on Intel’s top-tier ACM-G10 GPU, it has the facility consumption to match, with a complete graphics energy score of 185W. Conversely, AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 and NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3050 are rated for 132W and 130W, respectively.

Graphics playing cards based mostly on the Intel Arc A580 GPU are set to be provided by ASRock, Gunnir, and Sparkle, beginning at $179. At $179, the boards are cheaper than AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 ($199) and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3050 ($199), which makes it fairly a aggressive providing. In the meantime, Intel’s higher-performing Arc A750 can now be obtained for $189 – $199, which considerably reduces attraction of the brand new board – although it stays to be seen if these A750 costs will final.