Share with others:
Intel introduced the Intel Arc A580 graphics card
After a long wait, the Intel Arc A580 graphics card has finally arrived on the shelves. It was announced already in 2022 and the expected time of the start of sales was the beginning of this year. As the months passed, the price of the existing Arc A750 card dropped. Many rightly wondered if Intel had simply abandoned the project. Obviously not, because the card is already available for purchase and has quite a few tricks that could convince certain users.
Functionally, the Arc A580 looks very similar to the A750 and A770 8GB. The key difference is that the four additional Xe cores are disabled along with the accompanying shader drives and XMX units. But it still has a full 256-bit memory interface with the same 8GB GDDR6 VRAM as previous Arc models.
At the moment, the Arc A750 card is available for around 200-250 euros, which puts it in direct competition with the newer A580 card, which has a starting retail price of around 200 euros. For a few tens of euros more, you get 17 percent more shaders and computing power, which is a much more attractive option than buying a new A580. We expect that soon after the launch, the prices of the new cards will drop by at least a few tens of euros, otherwise it may happen that the card will be overshadowed by other models from the same family.
The Arc A580 also has to beat the RTX 3050 and RTX 3060, which are in the same price range. The A580 should at least beat the 3050 in terms of performance. There's also the newer RTX 4060 card, which is currently available for €300 and some change. Although it is actually more expensive, it is also more powerful, especially when using "ray tracing".
AMD's closest competitor is the RX 6600 (without XT), which has also been on sale for less than 200 euros in recent months. So in terms of price, the two cards are very equal. What about performance? Drivers? Power consumption? Intel drivers are improving, but for now they are not at the same level as the competition. However, we expect performance at a very similar level to that of the aforementioned competition. The maximum consumption of the new card is limited to 185 W, although we can expect fans to exceed this value.
The Intel Arc A580 is, on paper, a good card with good value between price and performance. Intel needs to close the price gap between the Arc A580 and the Arc A750 before it can be recommended for purchase.
