With the GPU market slowly returning to normal, we're finally seeing Nvidia and AMD cards returning to shelves, potentially just in time to get some brand new competition. After a few delays and much speculation it looks like Intel has finally officially launched its first Arc desktop graphics card for sale.
VideoCardz spotted the press release regarding the Intel Arc A380 upcoming sale in China. Towards the bottom it states that these GPUs will be available in China this month. There was some speculation this was going to be pushed back further into Q3 of this year, but now stock is set to be available through system builders in China very soon, then moving onto parts sellers.
According to the press release, it looks like we're set to see these cards in partner devices first with Acer, Asus, Gigabyte, GUNNIR, HP, and MSI specifically mentioned by name. This means Intel GPUs could be cropping up in a whole bunch of new systems over the next month and into the second half of this financial year. What a time to be alive.
Being an entry level gaming card, the Arc A380 shouldn't be too expensive and current China pricing seems to confirm this. It's currently priced at 1030 Yuan which is close to $150 USD. Intel claims the card is up to 25% faster per yuan spent than AMD's budget gaming offering, the Radeon RX 6400. Given they're still selling for between about $160 and $200 USD, the Arc A380 could be some good competition for a low level card.
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The specs for the A380 were leaked earlier this year, but it has 8 Xe Cores and 1024 FP32 Cores as well as 6GB of memory. It's certainly a modest little gaming card, with a power draw of only 75W. It's said to be able to handle all Direct X 12 features and even pull off hardware accelerated ray tracing, though we doubt that would be useful on particularly intensive games.
After the release in China we should see the card come to other regions, but there doesn't seem to be any word on when yet. Still, having it launch in China first is often a good test for hardware. Plus it lets us see how these cards perform in real life a bit before they're released in our market, hopefully weeding out any faults or bugs that may come with a brand new product launch.
