Intel's first Arc Alchemist desktop graphics card was released last month - but as you may remember it's still on sale only in China - and now many reviews of manufacturer Gunnir's lower-end model are popping up, with disappointing conclusions about performance. However, a review gives us a possible explanation for what might be going on here.
These Gunnir Arc A380 Photon reviews have appeared in China (of course), Germany, and a few other countries, including Russia, with the latter being the one of interest here.
Generally speaking, the reviews (as reported by VideoCardz - opens in a new tab)) have not been kind to Intel, with Igor's Lab declaring the Gunnir card "unapproved" for example (with a score of 1/5 , but note, there has been a lot of criticism leveled at Gunnir, the manufacturer itself, and the quality of their card, as opposed to Intel, which only produces the GPU).
However, as Hot Hardware spotted (Opens in a new tab), there's more brilliant news, of sorts, here in that aforementioned Russian review by Pro Hi-Tech on YouTube (Opens in a new tab). While the Gunnir A380 fell behind Nvidia's GTX 1650 and was disappointed with its overall performance, the reviewer noted that the graphics card only drew a little over 35W despite being equipped with an external power connector, which indicates that it could be much more than that. , as a GPU can draw a modest amount of power directly from the motherboard and only needs external power from the PSU if it is a 75W+ model.
So the reviewer decided to upgrade the A380 and see the results, and while Arc GPUs don't work with third-party overclocking utilities, luckily Intel has its own overclocking feature built into the graphics controller (Arc Control Center).
The reviewer increased the GPU performance to 55% while increasing the base voltage by 255mV, resulting in an increase in power consumption from around 35W to 55W, and further performance gains.
Some games performed better than others with the new settings, as they always will, but to give you an idea of the big difference some titles saw, Doom Eternal got a 60% boost. Yes, it is huge. Other games still have a lot of turbo, like God of War with a 40% performance boost.
Analysis: Is it some kind of magic? No, not really…
So what is going on here? Does Intel's overclocking tool work like some kind of magic to drastically increase frame rates? Because with a typical overclocking scenario with existing AMD and Nvidia desktop graphics cards, gamers get small (but worthwhile) improvements, but nothing on that kind of scale.
The key here is that there's a big difference between messing with a graphics card's clock speeds to bump them up a bit, and bumping the power up to just that much. Remember that's a 20W jump, and with the default graphics card at 35W, that's over a 55% increase in power delivery. Then suddenly those 40% to 60% jumps in performance for some games start to make a little more sense...
So the question is: if this A380 GPU is apparently operating at a much lower power envelope than it could possibly achieve, why is that so?
Hot Hardware notes that in a conversation with Intel Fellow Tom Petersen, he said that Team Blue's clock speeds for Arc were at lower levels and were "worst case" numbers, indicating that many more could be pushed for Alchemist GPUs. – and so could power limits. Intel may have set these low values to err on the side of caution and really ensure the stability and reliability of the A380, especially on these early cards, which work with drivers that don't work yet.
And yes, from the various reviews out there right now, the Arc controller is still a work in progress, and that's kind of it (one reviewer commented that he encountered a "minefield" of driver issues during his evaluation of the A380. ).
We speculate that the decision to only launch in China to begin with was to dip its toes in water with a desktop GPU that was still having boot issues, and it sounds like that might be the case if these reviews are anything to go by. . And rather than risk damaging the reputation of the Arc A380 misfiring in this early incarnation, and the possible perception that the Arc brand might disappoint when it launches outside of Asia, Intel has been particularly careful about limits. power, thermals and clocks.
This is all speculation, of course, but the good news is that if so, the driver situation will improve over time, as will the tuning applied to graphics cards and performance levels. (Of course, we don't know if the kind of power jump seen here is acceptable in the long run, and pushing that hard may not be smart, but there seems to be quite a bit of wiggle room with the A380, in any case.) Speed).
This restricted power envelope would also theoretically explain why these early performance ratings make the A380 a poor match for the Nvidia GTX 1650 or AMD RX 6400 (the latter of which is not unlocked for overclocking) at the budget end of the market. of GPUs.
As well as the prospect that there is a lot of room for improvement, perhaps in terms of default power levels, and certainly with drivers, there has also been some other positive news recently regarding desktop Arc GPUs, namely that they don't support crypto-mining. .
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