While the GPU market is still mostly a competition between Nvidia and AMD, there is still a third party trying to make a name for itself —Intel. The company is hugely popular with desktop processors, but with itsrecent GPU launches, it’s trying to become popular in this segment as well. The company has launched yet another graphics card, the A580 — and it’s really cheap.
The Intel Arc A580 is Intel’s lowest end card to date. The company is pitching this card for 1080p gaming, which is pretty good considering the price it’s carrying. The card has 24 Xe cores and 24 ray tracing units, as well as 8GB of VRAM and a graphics clock speed of 1,700 MHz. It also has a TDP of 185W, just 40W less than the TDP of Intel’s A750 and A770, and a lot less than the TDP of most high-end cards out there. It’s not the lowest, but it’s certainly decent.
Early reviews of this GPU find that it’s able to battle the likes of the NVIDIA RTX 3050 and the AMD Radeon RX 6600. On one hand, this is good, as it means that it’s very good as far as a budget GPU goes. But on the other hand, these are already last-gen cards, and while replacements to these cards have yet to land from NVIDIA and AMD, they will eventually come as well.
The good news is that Intel is also rumored to be coming out with new GPUs sooner than later. The company kind of needs to do it because, while the drivers have matured, software improvements only really get you so far, and eventually you’ll also need matured hardware to improve even further. Intel might launch its upcoming GPUs, codenamed Battlemage, next year, but of course, we’ll need to wait and see.
As for this GPU, you’ll be able to buy it for a mere $180. Whether it’s a worthy option is really up to you — it’s one of the cheapest modern GPUs money can buy, but some RTX 3050 SKUs aren’t really too far behind as far as price goes. TheASRock Challenger Arc A580andSPARKLE Intel Arc 580are available now on Newegg, and other models will likely follow soon.
