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Intel Arc A380M

Intel Arc A380M: Budget GPU for Beginner Gamers and More

April 2025

Introduction

The Intel Arc A380M graphics card, introduced in 2022, marked the company's initial foray into discrete graphics for laptops and compact PCs. By 2025, it remains relevant thanks to driver updates and optimizations. In this article, we'll explore who this model is suitable for, how it performs in modern tasks, and what to pay attention to when making a purchase.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Xe-HPG Architecture

The A380M is built on the Xe-HPG (High-Performance Gaming) architecture, specifically designed for gaming and multimedia tasks. The chip is manufactured using TSMC's 6nm process, which ensures a balance between energy efficiency and performance.

Unique Features

- XeSS (Xe Super Sampling): Upscaling technology similar to NVIDIA's DLSS and AMD's FSR. It helps increase FPS in games that support this feature while maintaining image detail.

- Hardware Ray Tracing: Built-in RT cores handle realistic lighting and shadows, but due to the limited number (8 cores), performance in ray tracing modes is modest.

- Deep Link: Optimizes collaboration with Intel's integrated graphics to accelerate rendering and streaming.

2. Memory: Speed and Capacity

GDDR6 and Bandwidth

The graphics card is equipped with 6GB of GDDR6 memory with a 96-bit bus. The bandwidth reaches 186GB/s, which is lower than competitors with 128-bit buses (e.g., NVIDIA GTX 1650 – 192GB/s).

Impact on Performance

For 1080p gaming, this amount is sufficient, but some projects with high texture settings (e.g., Cyberpunk 2077) may experience stutters. In professional tasks, 6GB limits work with heavy 3D scenes or neural network models.

3. Gaming Performance

1080p: Comfortable Gaming

- Fortnite (high settings, no RT): 65–75 FPS.

- Apex Legends (medium settings): 70–80 FPS.

- CS2 (maximum settings): 120–140 FPS.

1440p and 4K: Not for Everyone

At 1440p, FPS drops by 30–40%. For instance, Red Dead Redemption 2 yields 35–45 FPS on medium settings. For 4K, the card is not recommended—even in lighter projects (Overwatch 2), the frame rate rarely exceeds 50 FPS.

Ray Tracing

When RT is activated in Minecraft, FPS drops to 25–30 frames, but with XeSS enabled, it rises to 40–45. For smooth gaming with RT, a more powerful GPU is advisable.

4. Professional Tasks

Video Editing and Rendering

Thanks to support for AV1 and HEVC codecs, the A380M is effective for 4K video editing. In DaVinci Resolve, rendering a 10-minute video takes 12–15 minutes (compared to 8–10 minutes for the RTX 3050).

3D Modeling

In Blender using OpenCL, the card shows modest results: rendering the BMW scene takes 14 minutes (the RTX 3060 handles it in 7 minutes).

Scientific Calculations

For tasks on OpenCL (e.g., simulations in GROMACS), the A380M lags behind even budget NVIDIA cards due to a less developed driver ecosystem.

5. Power Consumption and Heat Generation

TDP and Recommendations

The TDP of the graphics card is 75W, allowing it to run without additional power supply. For a build with the A380M, suitable components include:

- A case with at least 2 fans (e.g., DeepCool MATREXX 40).

- CPU cooler: tower type (Cooler Master Hyper 212) or standard BOX.

Temperature Conditions

Under load, the GPU heats up to 70–75°C. In compact cases, overheating is possible—monitor ventilation closely!

6. Comparison with Competitors

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650

- Pros of NVIDIA: Better driver optimization, DLSS.

- Cons: No RT support, more expensive (around $160 compared to $130 for the A380M).

AMD Radeon RX 6400

- Pros of AMD: Higher performance in Vulkan games.

- Cons: Lack of hardware AV1 encoding support.

Conclusion: The A380M wins in price and support for modern codecs but falls short in gaming optimization.

7. Practical Tips

Power Supply

A 400–450W PSU is sufficient (e.g., be quiet! System Power 10). Ensure the PSU has an 80+ Bronze certification.

Compatibility

- Motherboard: PCIe 4.0 x8 (backward compatibility with PCIe 3.0).

- Processor: Intel Core i3/i5 10th generation or newer is recommended to avoid bottlenecks.

Drivers

Regularly update software through Intel Driver & Support Assistant. For older games (released before 2020), issues may arise—check for patches on the Intel website.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Low price ($130–$150).

- Support for AV1 and hardware Ray Tracing.

- Energy efficiency.

Cons:

- Weak drivers for older games.

- Limited memory capacity.

- Modest performance in 4K and RT modes.

9. Final Verdict: Who is the A380M for?

This graphics card is an ideal choice for:

- Budget gamers playing in 1080p at medium settings.

- Content creators working with AV1 encoding.

- Compact PC owners who value silence and low power consumption.

If you are not ready to spend more than $200 and do not demand maximum performance from games, the Intel Arc A380M will be a reliable companion. However, for professional 3D rendering or 4K gaming, it is advisable to consider more powerful solutions.

Prices are current as of April 2025. Check for promotions and updated models before purchasing!

Basic

Label Name

Intel

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

January 2023

Model Name

Arc A380M

Generation

Alchemist

Base Clock

1550MHz

Boost Clock

2000MHz

Bus Interface

MXM-A (3.1)

Transistors

7,200 million

RT Cores

Tensor Cores

Tensor Cores are specialized processing units designed specifically for deep learning, providing higher training and inference performance compared to FP32 training. They enable rapid computations in areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, text-to-speech conversion, and personalized recommendations. The two most notable applications of Tensor Cores are DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and AI Denoiser for noise reduction.

128

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

6 nm

Architecture

Generation 12.7

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

6GB

Memory Type

GDDR6

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

96bit

Memory Clock

1937MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

186.0 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

64.00 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

128.0 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy.

8.192 TFLOPS

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

1024 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

4.014 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

1024

L2 Cache

4MB

TDP

35W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.3

OpenCL Version

3.0

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 Ultimate (12_2)

Shader Model

6.6

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.