Intel Arc Alchemist Performance Is Worse And Slower Than Expected

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Today brings yet another round of bad news for Intel Arc Alchemist, this time involving the Arc A380, the company’s first discrete GPU for desktops.

When Intel first announced the card, it compared it to the budget AMD Radeon RX 6400, claiming that the A380 would provide a performance boost of up to 25% over the RX 6400.

Intel’s claims have been scrutinized, and the A380, unfortunately, falls short of expectations. Although the Intel Arc GPU is faster than the AMD RX 6400, the difference is only 4%. The rest of the lineup’s cards have also been re-examined.

The A380, Intel’s first Arc Alchemist desktop GPU, was just released. The card is currently only available in China, and it is only shipped in pre-built desktop PCs. However, Intel has stated that it will soon move on to the next stage, which will be the DIY market in China, followed by the global market.

Intel included a performance slide for the GPU with the release announcement, showing the average frames per second (fps) when gaming at 1080p on medium settings.

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With that, Intel claimed that the A380 would be up to 25% faster than the AMD Radeon RX 6400 — but there were no figures to back up that claim on the slide. This prompted 3DCenter to double-check the information, and it’s bad news for Intel Arc all around.

The general public appears to have overlooked an important aspect of Intel’s claims: the promise of a performance boost of up to 25% only applies to a performance versus price comparison. In short, the actual performance boost is much smaller than expected because the RX 6400 is slightly more expensive than the A380.

The data for the Intel Arc A380 and the RX 6400 were compared by 3DCenter. The AMD graphics card costs 1,199 yuan ($178), while the Intel GPU costs 1,030 yuan (roughly $153).

When it comes to performance per yuan, according to 3DCenter, Intel’s claims mostly hold up — the Arc A380 wins by around 21%, making it more cost-effective. The raw performance gains, on the other hand, are much smaller, averaging around 4%.

As a result of these findings, 3DCenter decided to investigate some of the other claims made about the performance of the entire Intel Arc lineup.

Although these comparisons, like Intel’s claims, are difficult to verify, it appears that it’s best to keep your expectations low when it comes to Intel Arc desktop GPUs.

The flagship Intel Arc A780 was frequently compared to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, and even the RTX 3070 Ti, thanks to its full 32 Xe-cores across a 256-bit bus and 16GB of GDDR6 memory.

However, 3DCenter now predicts that the GPU will be “slightly worse than RTX 3060 Ti,” and that the other GPUs in the range will be “significantly slower than Radeon RX 6400.” The most entry-level A310 will now be called “significantly slower than Radeon RX 6400.”

It’s difficult to deny that Intel’s first discrete gaming GPU launch is looking a little bleak. Intel Arc may struggle to find its footing in a GPU market dominated by Nvidia and AMD after numerous delays, a staggered launch, and, most importantly, questionable performance.

Despite the wait, it’s still early days, and additional driver optimizations could propel Intel Arc to the top of the GPU rankings — especially if the company keeps the price low.

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