Intel’s $180 Arc A580 aims for budget gaming builds, but it’s a hard sell
Enlarge / Intel's Alchemist GPU silicon, the heart of the Arc A750, A770, and now, the A580. (credit: Intel)
Intel's Arc GPUs aren't bad for what they are, but a relatively late launch and driver problems meant that the company had to curtail its ambitions quite a bit. Early leaks and rumors that suggested a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti or RTX 3070 level of performance for the top-end Arc card never panned out, and the best Arc cards can usually only compete with $300-and-under midrange GPUs from AMD and Nvidia.
Today Intel is quietly releasing another GPU into that same midrange milieu, the Arc A580. Priced starting at $179, the card aims to compete with lower-end last-gen GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 or AMD Radeon RX 6600, cards currently available for around $200 that aim to provide a solid 1080p gaming experience (though sometimes with a setting or two turned down for newer and more demanding games).
The A580 is based on the exact same Alchemist silicon as the Arc A750 and A770, but with just 24 of the Xe graphics cores enabled, instead of 28 for the A750 and 32 for the A770. That does mean it has the exact same 256-bit memory bus as those higher-end cards, attached to a serviceable-for-the-price 8GB pool of GDDR6 RAM. Reviews from outlets like Tom's Hardware generally show the A580 beating the RTX 3050 and RX 6600 in most games, but falling a little short of the RTX 3060 and RX 7600 (to say nothing of the RTX 4060, which beats the Arc A750 and A770 in most games).