Further Reading New Intel GPU chauffeurs assist address among Arc’s most significant staying weak points When we discuss Intel’s Arc GPUs, we’re typically paying the most attention to the A750 and A770 because they’re the cards that perform well enough that you might actually put them in an entry-level-to-midrange video gaming desktop. However there’s one other Arc graphics card of note: the lowly Arc A380, which snuck into some stores a couple of months prior to either high-end Arc card was launched.
With its eight Xe cores (below 32 in the A770), 96-bit memory interface, and 6GB of RAM, the Arc A380 has actually been (in my case, literally) nothing to compose home about. It’s an entry-level graphics card that competes fairly well with low-end and ancient cards like Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 1650 and AMD’s Radeon RX 6400, and its hardware-accelerated AV1 video encoding support makes it mildly interesting for people who work with video. It’s one of the better GPUs you can get for $100, its current street cost, however that’s not saying much.
. At least, it would be if it were an actual increase in the card’s peak clock speed, which it isn’t. We have an ASRock Challenger ITX version of the A380, a card we bought back in the early days of Arc to track the progress of Intel’s buggy drivers(it notified our original review of the A750 and A770). I can confirm firsthand that the new motorist bundle does update the GPU’s firmware, and reporting tools like GPU-Z and HWInfo did indeed report a clock speed boost from 2,000 to 2,150 MHz. But that number does not represent the genuine peak clock speed of the Arc A380, and in the tests we ran, we discovered no statistically considerable distinction in performance.
Intel’s own Arc spec sheet lists the graphics clock of the A380 at 2,000 MHz, but in Intel’s own words, this number “represents the typical clock an end user may see in a normal video gaming workload, “not the maximum clock speed at which the card can run. For the Arc A380, this maximum clock speed (both before and after the firmware upgrade )was actually 2,450 MHz, and the A380 runs cool enough and uses little bit enough power that the GPUnever ever throttled its speeds throughout multiple benchmark runs. That 2,450 MHz clock speed is likewise the one utilized by the GUNNIR-branded Arc A380 card that lots of early reviewers evaluated, in addition to every Arc A380 result I signed in the Geekbench results database; in other words, this setup seems to be the standard for A380 GPUs and not an exotic card-specific overclock.
To confirm our work, we also turned Intel’s nontransparent Arc overclocking slider in the Arc Control app as much as 25, which raised the A380’s optimum reported clock accelerate to 2,528 MHz, a roughly 3 percent increase. This relatively mild overclock enhanced our benchmark ratings by … 2 or 3 percent. If the firmware-provided “overclock” had actually enhanced efficiency, the tests we’ve run would have picked up on it.
Intel validated to Ars that the clock speed modification was not planned to alter the A380’s
performance, and it shouldn’t be seen as an “overclock.””In a recent chauffeur update, we altered the reported graphics clock of the A380, “an Intel spokesperson informed Ars.”Actual efficiency and frequency were not impacted and we are working on an update to go back the change in a future driver update.”
So what does this firmware update do? It’s not mentioned in the release notes, but Intel told Neowin recently that it “brings stability enhancements, much better fan behavior, bug repairs, and better compatibility with HDMI connections.”
Even if you can’t get a free clock speed boost from a firmware upgrade, it’s worth it to make sure your Arc motorists depend on date. The Arc A380 will benefit to some level from the exact same “rearchitected” DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 drivers, Arc Control app updates, and other fixes that Intel has actually launched for all Arc cards, significantly dealing with the majority of our biggest concerns about the early drivers.
Noting image by Intel/Andrew Cunningham