Is the Intel Arc A380 worth buying in 2023?

Intel's budget range graphics card, the Arc A380, was released in June last year as a direct competitor to Nvidia and AMD's offerings. The graphics card landscape needed the entry of a third player to break the duopoly of AMD and Nvidia. To everyone's joy, Intel marketed its cards at prices significantly lower than the other two manufacturers had introduced.

Since then, Intel has faced some driver issues with DX11 and DX9 titles, because of which, there is a certain level of apprehension among gamers and GPU enthusiasts.

Going into 2023, are these apprehensions justified, or has Intel managed to turn the tide in its favor by optimizing the drivers well for the Arc A380?

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Intel Arc A380 is a tricky recommendation in the sub $200 category

Specifications

Memory Size	6 GB
Direct X support	DX 12 Ultimate
Power draw	75 W
Core clock frequency	2 GHz
Core count	8
Memory bus width	96 bit
Memory Speed	15.5 GBps
Memory bandwidth	186 GBps

The Intel Arc A380 is based on a TSMC-manufactured 6 nm architecture. Interestingly, Intel chose TSMC's fabrication process over its foundry. The reason cited by Intel was balance, which is just one way of admitting that the TSMC process was superior and cheaper.

Intel has provided 8 Ray-tracing cores on the A380, but it is unwise to expect significant ray-tracing performance in this price range. Ray-tracing will massively eat into the available frames that the card outputs, which are plentiful at 1080p high settings.

The Xe cores of the card sit at a number 8, while the clock speed of the GPU is at 2 GHz. This core clock speed is just about decent and in line with modern GPU offerings from the competition.

The A380 only comes with a memory size of 6GB, which is plentiful for the targeted resolution and frames. Playing on 1080p in medium to high settings doesn't usually require a lot of video memory, and 6 GB on the Arc A380 is sufficient for the most part.

Since this is a budget card, the sacrifices made were in the graphics memory interface width or the GPU bus width. A mere 96 bits of memory width is available on this card. The bandwidth is again on the lower side, with about 186 GBps available at max utilization.

The memory speed is at a decent 15.5 GBps, thus ensuring that communication between the GPU processor and its VRAM isn't lacking.

The supported APIs on Arc A380 are DirectX 12 Ultimate and Vulkan version 1.3. This is one area where Intel has been lagging since its release. Older titles, which rely on DX 9 and DX 11 APIs, need updates and optimizations to be pushed by Intel to work well and output decent frames.

Intel has thankfully done something in this regard but has also decided to focus more on DX 12 and beyond.

As for the output support, the Arc A380 supports Display port 1.4 and HDMI 2.1, but the card can never output these technologies' maximum supported resolution and refresh rate. Furthermore, the A380 has in-built support for H.264 and H.265 hardware encoding and decoding.

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A380 is about 10 to 15 % slower than similarly priced cards

The nearest competitor to A380 is perhaps 1650 from Nvidia and RX 6500XT from AMD. The Intel card is a good 20 percent cheaper than the competition cards. It is, however, also 10 to 15 % slower across a lot of AAA titles while managing to match these two cards in some.

This drawback is interestingly observed in DX 9 and DX 11 titles. Intel managed to nearly match the performance of these cards in the newer DX 12 titles. We should see better performance from the Intel budget card with further updates and driver optimization.

Regarding sheer power efficiency, the RX 6500XT handsomely beats Intel by offering better performance at a lower power draw.

The A380 performs best on an 11th gen Intel chip and higher, with Resizable BAR on with DX 12 titles. This is too much for people interested in plug-and-play. For anyone looking for a budget GPU to pair with their 11th-gen or higher Intel CPU for mostly DX 12 titles, the Intel Arc A380 may be a decent choice.

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Ultimately, it is difficult to recommend the A380 over cards like the RX6500 XT in the present scenario. However, things can change for the better for Intel with some more tweaks and optimizations in upcoming driver updates. The hardware has potential, but the software needs some tweaking.