Yesterday, out of nowhere, a long-awaited graphics card appeared that could be a really good deal

0
186

Intel is bringing the lost Arc A580 back to light. This could be the best cheap graphics card in the 200 euro range with ray tracing

Intel surprises this week with the release of the Arc A580 card. True, this GPU was announced last year. But since then there has been a radio silence.

What can the new Intel Arc A580 graphics card do?

If you’re currently looking for a budget graphics card, you might find what you’re looking for in Intel’s Arc series. The new A580 card also ties in with this.

The Intel Arc A580 places itself between the Arc A380 (approx. 150€ at Cyperport) and the Intel A750 (approx. 260€ at Geizhals) in terms of performance.

The price of the Arc A580 is supposed to be 179 US dollars, which is just under 170 euros. So what does it come with?

Here are the most important data in a short overview:

Overview Intel Arc A580 Intel Arc A750
GPU ACM-G10 ACM-G10
Graphic Clock 1700MHz 2050MHz
Boost Clock 2400MHz 2400MHz
cores   24 28
Raytracing cores 24 28
VRAM 8GB 8GB
VRAM Speed 16GBs 16GBs
Memory Bandwh. 512Gbps 512Gbps
TDP   185W 225W
PCI Express Standard 4.0 x 16 4.0 x 16

The A580 is only available in a third-party version. This is shown by a picture on the Intel page. There ASRockGunnir and Sparkle are listed as partners. It is still unclear whether other providers will follow.

If you see A580 cards with the suffix OC: These models are already overclocked to 2000 MHz by the manufacturer. This corresponds at least according to Intel (approximately 18% more performance).

Why is the graphics card only coming now? The A580 was supposed to be launched earlier. Intel revealed in an interview with TechRadar that the team needed more time to solve driver issues due to the launch of the A700 series and therefore the release of the A580 was delayed.

Since we introduced the Intel Arc A770 and A750 products last year, our teams were focused on improving the gaming experience with those products before introducing new ones.

– Intel in conversation with TechRadar

What can you play with it? According to Intel, you should be able to play newer games in 1080p (FullHD) with over 60 FPS with this card. As examples Marvel’s Spider Man: Miles Morales and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart are mentioned.

Which cards does the A580 compete with?

  • AMD’s Radeon RX 6600, which currently costs around 200 euros.
  • The Nvidia Geforce RTX 3050 is priced between 230 and 250 Euros depending on the configuration.
  • Arc A750 is of course a bit more expensive. Depending on the configuration, it can be had for around 260 euros.

These prices may still change in the coming weeks.

What features does the A580 come with?

Raytracing is available in more and more games. Whether a graphics card is capable of this feature is something you should definitely consider when buying future graphics cards.

When you push the card to its limits, however, it becomes clear where its limits are. This can be seen in the performance test of the raytracing based on the game Cyberpunk 2077.

In Cyberpunk 2077 all cards achieve an average of between 28 and 32 FPS in FullHD in the test.

However, one should not forget that it is a cheaper graphics card and Cyberpunk 2077 is very demanding.

Another feature of the Arc cards is XeSS This is an AI-assisted super-sampling feature. Put simply, it gives you more frames per second. XeSS can also be used on AMD or Nvidia cards, as long as the developer integrates this feature.

For comparison: Nvidia relies on DLSS and AMD on FSR So this means that Intel has its own function.

Intel illustrates how much difference XeSS is supposed to make in your performance in the following graphic:

(The performance shown represents the FPS improvements due to the XeSS feature (Source: Intel))
(The performance shown represents the FPS improvements due to the XeSS feature (Source: Intel))

According to Intel, 63 percent higher frame rates are possible. If you take a closer look, this amounts to 75 instead of 62 frames in the case of Marvel’s Spider Man: Miles Morales, which is an increase of 13 frames per second.

Since these are Intel tests, these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. Long-term tests and comparisons will only show how much this card can finally show, depending on the manufacturer’s variant and setup!

What do you think? Would you buy this card? Does the price sound like a good alternative to Nvidia or AMD in the lower price segment to you? Sure, this card isn’t going to scratch the higher end performance, but that’s not even its job. Deal or no deal? Feel free to post it in the comments.