Watch out AMD: Intel Arc A580 could be the next great affordable GPU
Newly leaked benchmarks for the Intel Arc A580 graphics card apparently showcase not only its test results but what those results mean compared to its potential competition.
According to the leaked benchmark data from Geekbench (and reported on by Wccftech), the Arc A580 has 24 cores, 384 EUs, and 3072 ALUs, with a clock speed of up to 2.4 GHz, which matches the Arc A770 and Arc A750 graphics cards. The A580 also features 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit bus, with up to 512 GB/s bandwidth and a TBP of 175W.
As it turns out, the numbers for the Arc A580 are on par with AMD’s semi-budget Radeon RX 7600 card. It scored 82,992 points within the OpenCL benchmark tests. This puts its results slightly higher than the AMD RX 7600 which scores around 82,981 points. Meanwhile, the Nvidia RTX 3060 is only 6.5% faster than the Arc A580. Being able to match both cards is especially impressive considering that the RTX 3060 and the RX 7600 are easily some of the best graphics cards out there.
The benchmark results show us the test setup, which included an Intel Core i7-1270 processor, 32 GB of DDR5-4800 RAM, and the ASUS ROG STRIX Z690-E Gaming WIFI motherboard. Unfortunately, we don’t have a launch date or pricing yet, so we’ll have to wait for confirmation from Intel for any official news.
Intel could come out swinging
What makes these test results even better is not only that the A580 performs just as well as the RTX 3060 and RX 7600 but that it will almost certainly be at a much cheaper price point. The Intel Arc A750 GPU has an official MSRP of $249, with discounts dipping it lower than $200. Going by this, the A580 will most likely start off as low as $199, and discounts would drop that even lower, potentially below $150.
There’s also the massive Arc Alchemist graphics cards driver update, as it was reported earlier in 2023 that Intel tracked down the source of a major performance bottleneck and fixed the issue, and has rolled out several patches for the broader Arc ecosystem since then.
If this conjecture turns out to be true, then we could have an extremely popular graphics card among gamers who have been waiting for a true budget card. This would be an excellent opportunity for Intel to grow its market share since both Nvidia and AMD have been slacking on low-end graphics card releases this gen.
This leak also comes on the rumor coattails of a possible Alchemist+ refresh, which is expected to launch at some point, though no other details are known right now. But the A580 could absolutely launch then, which could boost its popularity and sales even further. We’ll just have to see what Intel plans on doing for 2023 and beyond.
