Intel Arc A380 desktop graphics card debuts in China, ahead of global release

Intel has officially announced the availability of its Arc desktop GPUs in China. The Intel Arc A380 graphics card is the first in the company’s Arc A-series 3 graphics desktop products and is designed for both mainstream gamers and content creators.

Intel’s Arc A380 GPU will be available in China from several of the company’s desktop PC ecosystem partners including Acer, ASUS, Gigabyte, GUNNIR, HP, and MSI from June 2022. Intel is expected to release its Arc desktop GPUs globally after its launch in China.

The Intel Arc A380 graphics card features a recommended customer price of CNY 1,030 (Roughly Rs 12,000), suggesting that it will be an entry-level graphics card, akin to Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650. However, Intel claims that the card will deliver 25 percent better performance for your buck than its competitors.

Intel’s Arc A380 GPU is the company’s first fully-featured desktop card based on the Intel Xe high-performance graphics (Xe HPG) microarchitecture. The A380 also comes with 6GB of DDR6 VRAM to support the latest games.

It supports a full set of DirectX 12 Ultimate features, including hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Intel claims that the Arc A380 can deliver 1080p gaming at 60 frames per second and more in popular titles like League of Legends, Moonlight Blade, Naraka: Bladepoint, and PUBG: Battlegrounds.

This also suggests that the card may have a tough time running AAA titles, which should come as a surprise considering its price range. The card also comes with Intel Xe Matrix Extensions AI acceleration engines that enable faster content creation.

The Xe Media Engine features industry-first hardware AV1 encoding acceleration and also supports HEVC and H.264 encode and decode. It is also capable of 8K resolution media processing. Additionally, the Xe Display Engine supports up to four 4K 120Hz HDR displays, up to two 8K 60Hz displays, or up to 360Hz for 1080p and 1440p resolutions.