Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “What the ARC A580 Means for the A770”.
Come for the Challenger a580 commentary, but stay for the ark a770 revisit it’s going to be one of those reviews all right. First up, this is actually a fun little card. If we take a look at it mechanically, it sure does look like we have all 16 PCI Express Lanes, that’ll be important later the PCB isn’t super huge here. We’Ve got a dual fan: a lot of copper heat p design.
As we’ll see, the Hotpot temperature is actually pretty reasonable. On this card got three display port 1.4, as well as our HDMI 2.1 output, solid metal back plate, dual 8 Pin power: dual 8 Pin power on a relatively modest card: Hey! Listen! It’S 2023! I ain’t! Judging this could have easily been a two slot card, but it is in fact a 2 and 1 half slot, therefore effectively three slot card. Now the io Shield is two slot, so if you’re working with a uh Micro, ATX or small form factor ITX case, that only gives you two slots at the rear.
Iio often there is enough room for a lower profile. Two slot two plus slot card like this. So be aware of that, if you’re planning this for a build or something like that, what makes this card appealing besides its physical form factor is the promise of performance, and we can see that if we initially look at time spy and fire strike. If we look at our time spy scores, the arc a580 Stacks up quite handsomely against an RX 7600, which doesn’t even have quite as many pcie lanes now. Actually, the pcie lanes thing is pretty interesting. This might factor in for an older, build like if you got an older PCI Express gen 3 build. Could the a580 actually outrun the RX 7600? It might because it’s 16 Lanes. I didn’t have time to get into that for this review, but this is something that I want to revisit with the ack Challenger a580. I think there there could be something there, but, as we’ll see the rest of the review, the performance in real life versus the 7600, not that awesome you see what my Hope was was that the a580 would give the RX 7600 a run for its money.
In terms of pricing, because well the RX 7600, it’s going to cost a little more. This GPU is well under $ 200. At the time that I’m doing this video, it is a challenger to the market, not just a Challenger in name because player 3 has entered the game Intel, and I really can’t overemphasize this enough.
Intel really needs to hang in there and stay in the game. I’M not really sure that Intel knows how to be second or third best in the market, but there is a lot of profit margin to be had in the GPU Market in general. I think Intel can do well in this market approaching the problem of gpus and GPU architecture with their software engineering mindset Intel employs a staggering number of software engineers and a lot of those software Engineers have a lot of work in the Enterprise and overall Intel’s product Strategy does seem to be centered around reusing, a lot of their ideas from their consumer stuff in the Enterprise, whether we’re talking about Golden Cove cores or Arc gpus. It seems like Intel’s a little behind on their Alchemist GPU schedule. They haven’t been super, transparent and super upfront about that. I’M sensing a little hesitation, but they really need to embrace their Arc gpus full steam ahead, especially at the lower midmarket part of the universe, and the reason I say that is not because of the a580.
It’S actually because of the a770 see in this review. I decided to revisit the Intel Arc a770, the azrock Phantom gaming version, which we used for all of our other benchmarks and believe it or not. It has become a surprisingly competent card. There are 100 % performance improvements like a performance doubling in some cases, and I think the time spy and fire strike benchmarks are kind of a port of what this card is capable of, because in those artificial benchmarks, this card is handily, beating an RX 7600 for Both time spy and time spy extreme, the a580 pulls well ahead of the RX 7600, and the a770 is even more impressive.
On top of that same is true in fir strike. Overall, our fire strike performance suggests that the a580 and the RX 7600 would be neck and neck in pretty much every case, except fir strike extreme, which is 4K. You wouldn’t expect this 8 GB vram GPU to really give you a significant show at 4K, but at 1080p it’s holding its own and first up things aren’t looking too bad with Shadow the Tomb Raider. We got 113 average with 83 frames per second at our 1 % lows and that’s not really dramatically slower than the a770, but the RX 7600 pulls very far ahead with 161 average FPS at 1080P and and keep in mind Shadow the Tomb Raider. It’S an older game, it’s usually just the one I start with to give us a baseline. What are we looking for? If you look at the frames per dollar metric, the performance Delta between the a580 and the RX 7600 uh doesn’t Merit the price Delta you’d, be better off saving your money for a better GPU with this much of a performance Delta and the Delta here is quite A bit larger than we saw with fire strike and time spy dipping into Borderlands 3 at the ultra preset for 1080p 118 versus 77 versus 138. The RX 7600 wins the day here, handily two to one margins, almost DSX mankind divided 80 versus 150 h 2. To one once again, not looking super good for the a580 Horizon: zero Dawn 84 versus 123.
This is a little more reasonable and I can tell you that it is pretty playable at 1080p on the a580 pleasantly surprised. As matter of fact, the Kalisto protocol, an older, is but new title. It’S not actually an old title at all.
It’S a brand new trip play title, but it’s been out a little while, which means we can see driver optimizations and the driver optimizations for the a580. Put it kind of close to the RX 7600: it’s not quite neck and neck, but this is a much better showing for the capabilities of this card. You can also see that our performance between the a770 and the a580 are pretty similar so for this particular title. If the RX 7600 is significantly more expensive than the a580, the cost savings there might make sense. Now what about Starfield Starfield is about 18 FPS.
There are some problems that have been pretty widely documented with The Arc a580. I was a little surprised to learn that as of testing this around October 15th that there were still performance anomalies, this is just playing the game at certain parts in the game and 18 FPS versus 32 versus 61. It’S not fabulous, but if you’re on team Intel don’t get super despondent. Yet I have some inspiring words in just a moment.
What about balers Gate 3? Well, balers. Gate 3 is a playable 63 FPS. It is a little janky, I’m I’m I’m sorry to admit, but it is what it is. It is playable, but it does have episodes of strangeness, which I am confident will get resolved in the driver issues which, which brings us to another thing that I want to sort of comment on. If you’re on team Intel uh don’t be despondent, don’t give up. It’S always darkest before the dawn, and this is by far uh, not the darkest results that I’ve seen from the a580, the a580 and the a770 show tremendous promise.
Intel has come farther faster than any company that we have ever seen entering this Market or working on gpus like it is remarkable how quickly those teams have have come. I fear that Intel has already made internal changes that are going to disrupt the productivity and progress that we have seen from the ark driver team. I hope that’s not the case the coming months and the next year will definitely tell for buyers. I sort of understand it’s like well. If we can count on the same level of performance Improvement that we’ve seen with the a770, the a770 is a really good deal. It’S actually probably changed the market.
The Intel Arc GPU serve to bring prices down of both AMD and Nvidia gpus. I get a feeling that Intel is not content to play that role, at least not yet they want to take over the market. That makes sense, but they’re going to have to be more disruptive and that much more tenacious if they actually do that. But I definitely do think this is a market where we need player. Three AMD has had their own fair share of embarrassments on the uh, the Radeon driver team, not the least of which is the anti-ag plus Banning Kur fuffle, which should have been caught in testing. This signals to me that there are improvements that need to be made up and down the stack in terms of how AMD manages these kinds of of things I mean clearly.
Nvidia has it figured out because they are the Juggernaut that they are, but Nvidia left to its own devices is really not good for gamers either. So I think that AMD can learn from Intel in terms of what the Intel driver team is doing and how Plucky and tenacious they are, or maybe it’ll free up. You know corporate politics or corporate resources, or things like that internally, because clearly AMD Hardware has got the goods, but also more worryingly, for AMD. If you look at time spy and you look at fire strike ex stream, clearly Intel also has the goods, from a hardware perspective, in very quick order, and if they’re able to sell this GPU at around1 180ish, US dollar, that’s definitely going to eat into the margins. For AMD, so maybe AMD has to get even more creative. Now intel is doing it with 16 pcie Lanes, whereas AMD is doing it with eight, maybe they’re, already ahead of the curve in terms of margins, performance and uh Hoops that they have to jump through. I get the feeling that the the arc team is also even smaller than amd’s team. Maybe that’s not true. Intel certainly has more software Engineers uh under their employee than AMD, at least in 2023, not necessarily a good thing, not necessarily a bad thing, because you got the inertia of all those developers, which may mean that you are not able to turn on a dime.
Smaller teams are are sometimes better than a larger team. I don’t know I don’t know what the future holds, but I can tell you that the a770 improving this dramatically since the a770 is out and possibly the a580 having the promise of this level of improvement over its lifetime would give anyone pause. I mean if you’re Nvidia, you have to be looking at the competition in the gaming market and thinking you know.
We’D, probably just be better off focusing on AI products and if you’re AMD you’re, probably looking at this and saying well with Nvidia, focusing on AI products. It creates a new opportunity for us for a gaming Market gaming gpus, which could possibly lead to even more uh adaptation of gaming products on the machine learning side geohot notwithstanding and if you’re Intel, you’re thinking. Our vantage point on the Enterprise offers uh possibilities for us to expand in both the Enterprise and consumer GPU Market.
We learn how games are put together. We learn about all the crazy under the hood driver optimizations. The strategy that AMD employed for anti-ag is not actually atypical AMD did not do a bad thing with what they’re doing with anti-ag to get players banned accidentally, it turns out, that’s actually how it’s done. It’S just that tab, a didn’t quite fit perfectly into slot B.
Communication notwithstanding and some other details under the hood, so you can’t fault AMD too much, but at the same time those lines of communication in corporate sectors should have been there to address this before it became a a public issue as it were, and Intel hasn’t even Uh tripped over these kinds of things yet, but they will they will they absolutely will when they’re working on these kinds of products, just you wait so overall, there’s the Challenger, the a580 global markets being what they are. This may be available in your Market at a significant price discount versus what you’re looking at for other products, and if that’s the case, this may be the right product for you. Pricing is really what’s going to drive it.
The drivers have been a little hit and miss historically, but the a580 driver today on launch is in a better place than the a770 driver was when it launched. So the Intel team clearly is learning uh internal corporate political disruptions of that team notwithstanding. So I think I’m pretty hopeful for the future. I just Intel has got to hang in the game and that will be better for gamers, and competition is good for gamers and a three-player ecosystem with reasonably well distributed. Market share is the best thing for gamers, and I’m all about that. I’M what this level one I’m signing out. You can find me in the level one forums hey. Did you pick one up how’s it doing for you, you run into any bugs.
Let us know in the Forum all right, I’m signing out and I’ll see you there .