Intel Alchemist: “Intel Arc A380” desktop graphics card presented – News

The graphics card market for discrete desktop graphics cards has been dominated by Nvidia and AMD for years, other manufacturers do not exist or no longer exist. A few years ago, Intel announced that it wanted to change this and sell PCIe graphics cards itself. This is the first time Intel has sold a discrete graphics card since 1999, because after the i740 was discontinued, Intel only had onboard graphics chips (e.g. in notebooks or mainboards) or integrated graphics units in modern CPUs (e.g. Core i -12000 series).

After several postponements and the lack of new information at the last major trade fairs, the time has now come. Intel yesterday in China together with the hardware manufacturer Gunnir Intel Arc A380 Introduced, Intel’s first standalone PCIe desktop graphics card. Gunnir’s custom model is shown in the lead image and has slightly more power than the reference model. According to Intel, the Arc A380 is aimed at mainstream gamers and content creators. The Arc A380 will be released by Intel’s partners (Acer, Asus, Gigabyte, Gunnir, HP and MSI) this month in China, first as OEMs and then in stores from the equivalent of 150 euros. The graphics card should also be available in Europe over the summer.

The Intel Arc A380 graphics card supports DirectX 12 and ray tracing, has 6 GB of GDDR6 graphics memory and is intended to play FullHD (1080p) games such as League of Legends, PUBG – Battlegrounds, Moonlight Blade or Naraka-Bladepoint can display with a smooth 60 frames per second. The GPU supports AV1 encoding as well as the two video compressions HEVC (H.265) and H.264 with a resolution of up to 8K. In addition, up to four 4K 120 Hz HDR monitors or two 8K 60 Hz monitors and up to 360 Hz in 1080p or 1440p (WQHD) resolutions are supported.

According to Intel, the graphics card should be between 14 and 27% faster than a Radeon RX 6400, depending on the game, although these results have yet to be confirmed by independent tests and the RX 6400 only has 4 GB of graphics memory and 64-bit memory bandwidth.