Intel Arc A380 Desktop GPU Does Worse in Actual Gaming than Synthetic Benchmarks

Intel’s Arc A380 desktop graphics card is generally available in China, and real-world gaming benchmarks of the cards by independent media paint a vastly different picture than what we’ve been led on by synthetic benchmarks. The entry-mainstream graphics card, being sold under the equivalent of $160 in China, is shown beating the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 in 3DMark Port Royal and Time Spy benchmarks by a significant margin. The gaming results see it lose to even the RX 6400 in each of the six games tested by the source.

The tests in the graph below are in the order: League of Legends, PUBG, GTA V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Forza Horizon 5, and Red Dead Redemption 2. We see that in the first three tests that are based on DirectX 11, the A380 is 22 to 26 percent slower than an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, and Radeon RX 6400. The gap narrows in DirectX 12 titles SoTR and Forza 5, where it’s within 10% slower than the two cards. The card’s best showing, is in the Vulkan-powered RDR 2, where it’s 7% slower than the GTX 1650, and 9% behind the RX 6400. The RX 6500 XT would perform in a different league. With these numbers, and given that GPU prices are cooling down in the wake of the cryptocalypse 2022, we’re not entirely sure what Intel is trying to sell at $160.