Intel Arc A380 is not “25% faster” than Radeon RX 6400
Intel Arc series may show strong performance in synthetic benchmarks, but there is a problem with gaming. According to Intel, its newly released Arc A380 desktop graphics card should be up to 25% faster than Radeon RX 6400, except this performance claim is in relation to the price of both cards, a seemingly important fact that can be missed.
GUNNIR Arc A380 Photon graphics card, Source: Intel China
The company has only released one performance slide for Arc A380 desktop GPU with average FPS at 1080p resolution with medium settings, but this slide is missing information on RX 6400 performance. Neither the footnotes nor Intel Performance Index website provides the data that can be quickly verified. 3DCenter actually went through the trouble of revalidating Intel claims and all available data and reached the following conclusion.
Intel Arc A380 vs AMD Radeon RX 6400, Source: 3DCenter.org
According to the site, the actual performance difference based on the price of both cards is somewhere around 21%. The actual performance (not based on pricing) is just 4% better, so almost within the margin of error of being identical to Radeon RX 6400.
This led 3DCenter into revalidating previous performance forecast for the whole series, and it is now a bit worse than previously reported. The flagship Arc A780/770 may not actually reach RTX 3070 performance, but should perform ‘slightly worse’ than RTX 3060 Ti. The upper mid-range Intel Arc desktop segment should compete with RTX 3060 and 3050 models, however all Arc A3-series models will not be able to surpass Radeon RX 6500 XT in gaming.
Intel Arc Desktop Performance estimation, Source: 3DCenter.org
There is still a chance that further driver optimizations will improve Arc performance in gaming, but given how limited the launch of A380 was (one country, only in prebuilt PCs and sold by one store only), gamers will rather be looking for RTX 30/RX 6000 deals instead. These series are now reaching below MSRP level. Not to mention the fact that we are probably 3 months before next-gen GPUs drop.
Source: 3DCenter.org