A couple of days ago Intel revealed their much-awaited Intel Arc branded Graphics processing units. With these GPUs, Intel has joined its comptetitor AMD and has finally launched itself into the world of discrete graphics as well. Different tires of the discrete GPUs were also announced by intel, where they will be developing them starting from lower budget category to high-end flagships. The mobile series is being called the A-series cards. Intel promises the cards will match the performance of current rivals and along with being very efficient. These cards include the entry-level A3 for enhanced gaming as Intel quotes it, A5 for advanced gaming, and the A7 for high-end gaming.
Meanwhile, the interesting part is that the entry-level Arc A350M has a TGP of just 25 to 35 Watt. Considering the power day, this makes the A350M a competitor to the GTX 1050 we saw from Nvidia all those years ago. However, the type of memory being used is a lot faster and more modern which is to be expected from a modern card. Also, it includes Ray tracing units too.
Furthermore, Samsung announced their Galaxy Book Pro 2 with the Alder Lake i7-1260P and Intel Arc A350M. Since the launch, we have been looking forward to benchmarks and stuff to get the actual hands-on performance of the Arc series. Fortunately, @harukaze5719, who also teased us about the Arc before it was even launched, tweeted about the benchmarks of the Galaxy Book Pro 2. The results were with the performance mode on and off and they were done using the popular 3DMark Firestrike.
Samsung Galaxy Book 2 PRO
Intel i7 1260P + Intel ARC A530MDefault VS Performance mode
3DMark Firestrike, TimeSpy pic.twitter.com/UP8mfvy9R0
— 포시포시 (@harukaze5719) March 31, 2022
There is a typo in the tweet as acknowledged by Harukaze where it says A530M but in actuality, the results are from A350M. The overall results paired with the CPU seem to deliver a good result But the thing that is concerning is the gaming performance. The TGP on the chip is so low that it is hardly expected to deliver the performance of the GTX1050. Even the GTX 1050ti Mobile might perform better than it in games. It is very curious why intel chose to go with this low TGP. No doubt part of the reason is the productivity factor as the laptop which will use are mostly going to be for productivity reasons along with light gaming on the side.
Despite this, the 3DMArk Firestrike is just a benchmark that most vendors use to showcase the performance of their machines. What we can expect in real-life scenarios, is yet to be seen. Also, we don’t have any gaming benchmarks for the GPU either therefore we can not say for sure what we can expect in terms of exact performance. The objective of this card is to make gaming more accessible. Gaming laptops are usually heavy and thick, this can make portable gaming a lot easier. No doubt, as Arc becomes more mainstream we will see better optimization and drivers that might make it a great option for a bit of light gaming.
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