Intel

Budget Intel Arc A580 GPU goes official.

October 11, 2023

Intel has announced a new GPU called the Arc A580 which now sits in between its budget-friendly A380 and more expensive A7 lineup. In this article, let’s take a look at the specs, features, and expected price in Nepal of the Intel Arc A580 GPU.

Intel Arc A580 GPU Overview

For starters, the new A580 is based on the exact same Alchemist silicon as the Arc A750 and A770. That means just like the other GPUs it also supports hardware-based ray tracing, XeSS (similar to NVIDIA’s DLSS), and DirectX 12 Ultimate.

It features the DG2-512 graphics processor chip with 21,700 million transistors but only has 3072 shading units compared to the 4096 in the A770. It has 24 Xe cores and 24 Ray Tracing units compared to the 32 Xe cores and 32 Ray Tracing units on the A770. Intel is marketing this GPU towards budget gaming builds so the 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM is an understandable choice.

Compared to the RTX 3050 and RX6600, the new Arc GPU has more than double the memory bandwidth at 512 gigabytes per second.

Gaming Performance?

Intel Arc A580 graphics come with modern technologies such as AI-enhanced Intel® Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) and hardware-accelerated ray tracing to boost gaming performance and deliver realistic visuals.

The card is going to be competing against the RTX 3050 and RX 6600 in the (sub) USD 200 price segment. Intel’s own Arc A770 which was originally launched for USD 320 is also available at around the same price now.

According to Intel, the card is capable of handling even the latest games like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales at 1080p High settings with over 60fps.

An independent test by Tom’s Hardware showed the new Arc A580 outperforming the NVIDIA RTX 3050 and Radeon RX 6600 in Ray Tracing overall.

And how can we forget about XeSS. According to the company, this upsampling technology can boost the fps from 50 to 73 in games like Remant II which is a 46% increase. Furthermore, for well-optimized titles like Ghostwire Tokyo, you can expect twice the frame rate with XeSS.

So, all in all, the gaming performance on the Arc A580 looks promising for its price. But one caveat may be that most games that run well on the card are Direct X12 titles so ones with older versions (Direct X9, X11) may not perform the best. That being said, Intel has come a long way when it comes to drivers and optimization here.

Others

The card also features dual hardware-accelerated AV1 encode and decode engines for content creators and video editors. Furthermore, Intel XMX (Intel Matrix Extensions) besides driving XeSS also provide good performance in AI workloads including generative models like Stable Diffusion.