Intel Launches Arc A580: A $179 Graphics Card for 1080p Gaming | Hacker News Reader

Intel Launches Arc A580: A $179 Graphics Card for 1080p Gaming

anandtech.com

121 pointsrcarmo101 comments

I bought an RX 6600 off of ebay for $155 half a year ago, for context, which, as the article mentions, is substantially more power efficient for nearly the same (poor for these days) performance.

It has "poor" performance relatively speaking, I guess, but on mine I'm playing all of my games with settings fairly high at 1080p at 100+ fps on my RX 6600.

Admittedly I'm not playing AAA games from the last few years.

I got an RX6600 new for a similar price not long ago. It definitely works well for 1080p gaming even with new titles. Provided you’re not expecting them to run at max settings or super high frame rates.

The inflation we're starting to see over the same timespan, makes that comparison harder to evaluate.

You mean the 6 month 2% core inflation? Technology has always depreciated quickly.

> You mean the 6 month 2% core inflation

Those numbers are highly dubious if my shopping experiences are anything close to those of the average person.

Core inflation == hand picked items by politicians that no one actually cares about or is price sensitive to

Hardly, the actual kicker is they allow substitutions which works well for price conscious consumers, but excludes things that fluctuate rapidly like gas.

Still very useful over the long term, but less so when supply shocks hit.

> The war on inflation is over. We won, at very little cost

Shows a chart that excludes food, shelter, energy, and used cars.

https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1712494317024026761

And which also undercounts the loss of value by a half or more, as the bulk of it manifests as reduction of unit sizes ("shrinkflation") and hidden reduction of quality of goods and services (we need a term for it too).

No, they account for shrinkflation: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-12/measuring-shrinkflati...

They also try to account for changes in quality (they call it hedonic quality adjustment): https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-ans...

It might be overloading the term, but I am partial to using "enshittefication" to describe the phenomenon of products and services getting worse over time.

It may well be that the economics persuade businesses to cut costs and lose sight of quality, but I supect it's a company politics issue more than it is economic.

Same here bought a used RX 6600XT - GPU prices are insane - last GPU I had was a RX580.

Looks like Intel realized they can't leave the GPU AI market to nVidia and to finance their own AI GPUs they need to sell a ton of GPUs to gamers first.

definitely agree

also, since this is a relatively recent development for Intel they also have to get their drivers & stack competitive, and there's clearly no better way to do that than by getting telemetry on exactly what ways your products are lacking and crashing things

edit to add:

I think there's also a really good chance that this winds up like the first generation of Ryzen systems did- not the most competitive, but quite cheap and with a few interesting features to get enough people over, and then eventually the future generations go on to go head-to-head with offerings from other companies.

I would be more surprised by the complete failure and disappearance of ARC in five years than by it duking it out in the datacenter and gaming markets even at the high end.

Same move as Tesla.

Opposite move as Tesla, they started on the expensive end to finance scaling up the cheaper ones.

Meanwhile Intel is going after the cheap ones to try and get a budget to tackle the more difficult AI/ML GPU market.

Starting with low-end is also a way to use aging factories.

Yeah it makes sense for their respective industries. There’s no dramatic manufacturing breakthroughs between a Model 3 and a Model S, just features and material quality, with the S having lower quantities at a higher profit margin.

Going back further there’s the Roadster, and it’s a good thing that was a niche vehicle because they hadn’t settled on the Supercharger design yet.

Is there any reputable website to easily compare GPU performances? I know it depends on the specific game/benchmark, but some kind of standardized score would really help.

Gamer's Nexus YouTube channel. They put a lot of effort to make sure they do like for like comparisons. They also point out that certain cards have strengths in some games and not others, and it depends on the settings. I highly recommend their videos.

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UChIs72whgZI9w6d6FhwGGHA

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html

Tom's has to be one of the longest-running sites on the internet. They've had a GPU hierarchy since 1997! Amazing consistency and longevity.

https://web.archive.org/web/19980109201410/http://tomshardwa...

Anandtech used to have a decent analog, but then it was sold.

Now it hasn't had a Bench/GPU update since 2019.

My favorite is Techpowerups' GPU database [0]. If you pick a model like the A580 [1], you'll get loads of information, including a comparison to other GPUs. Their tests are great too. I consult them to find the cards emitting the least amount of noise [2].

[0] https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/

[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/arc-a580.c3928

[2] https://www.techpowerup.com/review/gigabyte-radeon-rx-6600-e...

It is mostly a single metric, but it should give uniform results for approximate overall average performance if that matters. Has CPUs and disk drives as well.

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/

logicalincrements gives relative performance comparisons of gpus vs a current fast gpu - https://www.logicalincrements.com/

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/

Catering more to a German speaking audience but nonetheless a pretty good overview (updated quarterly?):

Performance: http://www.3dcenter.org/artikel/fullhd-ultrahd-performance-u...

Performance/Price w/ German market prices: http://www.3dcenter.org/artikel/grafikkarten-marktueberblick...

this is the best imo

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-RTX-2070S-Super...

Userbenchmark are an incredibly biased website towards Intel (vs. AMD), so much so that the Intel subreddit banned them. This is less obvious in how they change the weighting of the benchmark, but their AMD reviews are downright comedic, where everyone but them it bought by AMD and they are the last bastion of honesty. They might actually be more anti-AMD than pro-Intel, considering GPU reviews before Intel entered the market are also always 3/4 complaining that AMD bought everyone off.

See also: Userbenchmark - the April Fools that never ends (2kliksphilip)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSBj2LKkWg

This site is probably founded by someone - whose parents/siblings are working in Intel - who has Intel shares - who was rejected for a job application by AMD - A proxy of Intel PR department

What is support of Intel video cards on Linux nowadays?

They're fine. At least for the other Alchemist cards, A380, A750, A770, you need kernel 6.2+ for them to work correctly out of the box. Hopefully the same is true of A580. There is some issues, there's no sparse residency support yet so DX12 games don't run under Proton but otherwise they work.

I had to reinstall X-server (I couldn't find another way to make X use the new Intel drivers for some reason). Except that, all is fine. Upgrade to kernel 6.2+, update Intel drivers, reinstall X, swap cards. I also had to modify my grub and my Xconfig a lot to make my old Nvidia card work, and cleaning it up took an hour.

Overall, better experience than with Nvidia. If your computer/install is recent maybe you won't need to reinstall X at all. I kept my Linux across 2 mobo and 4 CPU over 10 years, I usually prefer patching/fixing the issues rather than reinstalling but I think I ought to clean it up.

Always have been the best out of the three

The users of Intel cards once upon a time based on PowerVR wouldn't say that.

Meh, let's stick to past 10-15 years

Seems fine, I have one of these Arc cards doing transcoding

I haven't been able to prove it yet but it seems to crash when I unplug the temporary display I have on the rack

It's either this or unfortunate timing/panics from this old ZFS release candidate/kernel

AFAIK xe-based GPUs are waiting for the next release to get more bits working, but IGT/UHD should be "fine".

The memory bandwidth could be interesting?

Going after pure gamers seems like a rough market for Intel to enter. But maybe with the extra compute and the memory bandwidth, they are actually going after devs and other professionals who also game sometimes? That seems like a good niche for them, at least to start chipping away at.

Pure gamers are the perfect market to target if they can sell budget cards with ever improving driver support. Even AMD's low end is laughably expensive these days (in terms of $/perf as well as pure cost), so there's a large market of people who buy budget cards that's being neglected by the existing market.

> Even AMD's low end is laughably expensive these days (in terms of $/perf as well as pure cost)

Amazon currently has some 7600s priced at $188. At $250+ they don't do well in this competition, but at that price I'd say the 7600 wins.

checks rx7600 price on local amazon

it's over 300 euro, twice the price of OP's

Sometimes I hate being in Europe.

In the USA most states require sales tax between 6 % and 8% which is not included in the list price, so make that $180 * 1.08 (I pay 8% where I live) makes it $194. Still not great for you, but it isn't like your taxes don't get you things that a lot of people in the States are super jealous of.

Don't euros have to pay 20% VAT over the list price on consumer goods like this?

I'm not being rhetorical, I'm not really sure when that does or doesn't get tacked on.

In Europe list price includes all applicable taxes in most cases.

The $188 card is shipping from China, so don’t be so jealous.

Almost no one else does 256-bit except for upper tier. This is a great call out of some ass kicking.

It costs them not really much, but most established vendors just don't wanna give away memory bandwidth, are trying to tier it up. Interesting to see Intel be like, hey, here's gobs of bandwidth for cheap.

Yeah, beyond just competition just driving down prices generally, adding a new entrant into the market seems have the advantage that they can make their own, totally different product differentiation decisions.

What's the reference language for compute on those cards?

1080p feels like the sweet spot for me in terms of resolution. I have 4K screens at the workplace office, and on my laptop itself, but it just doesn't matter very much to me.

I picked up a few 1080p screens for 80 euros apiece a few weeks ago to build out my home office and I'm very happy that the price has been driven so far down in the last 10 years.

For coding I agree. Roomy enough for an IDE but little neck movement required of larger monitors.

You know they make 4K screens that are the same size as regular 1080p right?

The point of 4K is clarity and legibility of text (at > 1.5x scaling), not size.

I don't get people who say 1080p is good enough for coding. They must have eyes at a lower resolution than mine not to being able to tell that text at 2x scaling is so much more readable and pleasant.

It feels like a fundamental paradigm shift.

From 14" CRT at 640x480 to 17" at 1024x768 or 1280x1024, to typical widescreen 1920x1080 LCDs, and finally to 2560x1440: most screen upgrades were about more "screen space" so you can display more content simultaneously.

This might mean that 4k never becomes a dominant factor in the desktop display market. There are too many corporate desks where they can say "You don't get any more Excel columns by going from 1080p or 1440p, so we won't spend the premium on a 4K monitor (or more GPU performance to feed it)"

That's what I just wanted to say. I basically had the same opinion as the OP for years, but just because I had nothing else than 1080p (usually 24"). About 3 years ago I finally bought a 27" 1440p screen and it felt incredibly much easier on my eyes, instantly. I don't know how much of a difference actual 4k would make right now, that's why I won't make such a broad statement that 1440p is my sweet spot, but it's better than 1080p@24", for me personally.

Legibility follows an exponential curve. The improvement will be noticeable up to smartphone densities (~220 dpi). After that, I don't think text can get any better. I won't be upgrading to 8K (384 dpi) anytime soon, but I have no intention to go back to 1080p even if they tend to have better refresh rates and are much cheaper.

I may be wrong here but I always thought that 1080p at 24" is about the same dpi as 1440p at 27"

1440p at 31.5" is around the same dpi.

But as you say if the same size then it is just about “readability” but I am probably used to the lower resolution. I never have issues reading.

I never had issues reading on a 1080p screen either, but it doesn't mean that you can't improve upon it. The legibility increase between 96dpi and 192dpi is massive.

Higher dpi looks pretty but isn't easier to read.

I think it’s massively easier to read as dpi increases, at least into the 150-200 dpi range. (I won’t claim that 1200 dpi is easier than 600, but 200dpi is definitely better than 100dpi.)

Massively better? Like 2% better?

More like 25% better

1920x1200 are the best screens for coding, it's a shame they're hardly made anymore.

Yeah, a 4k density no more than 27" 16:10 screen would be my dream. I recently moved to 4k 27" from 1440p 27" (both 16:9) and the text clarity is noticably better, but definitely in diminishing returns in clarity and not really different in screen real estate. But really I'd probably be happier with 24", but they just don't seem to make high density screens with decent features sets in that size anymore.

I don't get why ultra wide seems to becoming a thing, even outside of productivity it's either close enough I have to move my head to see each side, or far enough away a good proportion of my vision area is above and below the screen.

This has cost me a few thousand dollars to admit.

27" 4K is the sweet spot where the display is retina but the size is 1080p equivalent.

I like fullscreen applications for better focus.

That is where the supply is, but 27" used to be 1440p and should be 5k now. Or give me 24" 4k.

You overestimate LCD panel pixel scaling

It's good that more competitors join the GPU market, I am tired of Nvidias monopoly.

I really need to upgrade my 8 year old GPU, I can barely afford good one because of the high prices.

It his Arc architecture one that can take on NVIDIA for AI workloads once Intel expands and extends it?

1080p. Is this for driving TVs off a PC?

Steam Survey says 60% of users are on 1080p

And that's just 1080p, quickly adding the survey results shows that only ~27% of people have larger screens than 1080p, so ~73% if people have screens of 1080p or less.

Though arguably people on older screens aren't likely in the market for a new graphics card, even "midrange" like this.

Most of those screens below 1080 aren't old monitors, they're budget laptop screens, specially 1366x768.

Personally I dont want anything more than 1080.. My OS UI, text and games are perfect for me at 1080p. I defo dont want to use more electricity and lose frames pushing 4 times as many pixels for games.

Once you go with a higher resolution, you realize how blurry 1080p is. For gaming, 1440p 240hz is a pretty decent middle ground considering quality, price, and fps.

That's not how LCD monitors work. I own 1080p, 1440p and 4k monitors and I've gamed on all of them. None of them are blurry.

Edit: LCD monitors are not blurry if you use the native resolution. Go learn about pixels and resolutions if you think otherwise, because you clearly don't understand. There's no way for it to be blurry unless for some reason you're doing non-integer based scaling. https://tanalin.com/en/articles/integer-scaling/

Anti-aliasing makes it look blurry when the pixels are larger

Yeah, this is just nonsense.

I'm not sure what you mean, but people buying $179 GPUs are very likely to have a 1080p monitor.

Upscaling means you can push to a high refresh 2560x1440 and be fine, in nearly all games.

What you can drive natively isnt really that coupled to what you can render anymore. It's an unnecessary luxury having full native res rendering, great to have, nice, but no longer necessary at all for almost everyone.

Also if you are just gonna predominantly play on Steam Deck or some kind of video solution, then it's probably more than enough.

> nearly all games.

Only a few games unfortunately. https://game.intel.com/story/intel-arc-graphics-xess-games/

A lot of modern games that do not support Intel XeSS do still support AMD FSR, which looks worse than XeSS but works fine on all three GPU vendors. FSR2 especially looks 'decent enough', FSR1 does look a lot worse.

Not everyone is interested in playing games in 4880p at 245 FPS. Besides the obvious diminishing returns, consuming this much power and generating this much e-waste for entertainment is irresponsible.

Yeah. I've got a "low end" AMD card... 24" 1080p at mid-high settings and 100+ FPS is "enough."

That's just my personal preference. If somebody else feels differently that's fine.

I like 4k60 because it allows me to re-use my existing 4k monitor that I use for reading code.

To play a game at 1080p, I need a dedicated third-party application, because changing the resolution of the desktop is absolutely criminal and also results in blurry scaling artifacts rather than the perfect integer scaling that it should be.

4k to 1080p is a perfect integer scale. One pixel at 1920x1080 is a 2x2 pixel block at 3840x2160.

Changing the resolution of the desktop indeed has hideous effects in Windows. If my external monitor loses power for half a second, all my windows get forcibly resized to fit within the limits of my laptop's built-in screen. It is inconceivable to me that someone might actually want this functionality.

And yet somehow, if I close a window, unplug the external monitor, and reopen the window, it will open in the inaccessible virtual space where the external monitor used to be, and I have to use keyboard commands to move it onto the visible screen.

I don't want either of those things to happen, but I'm prepared to believe that I have to live with one or the other. (I'd rather have the second problem than the first one.)

Why are both of them happening?

> 4k to 1080p is a perfect integer scale. One pixel at 1920x1080 is a 2x2 pixel block at 3840x2160.

Exactly. It's one of the reasons why I mandate 4k and not 1440p, in addition to it also being a perfect 3x multiple of 720p, which is absolutely godlike for games like FTL: Faster Than Light.

Most games these days support DLSS and FSR. You should never run games at 1080p output, but instead whatever internal resolution you can handle, upscaled to 4k output.

I don't want that compromise on quality. Additionally, the quality of the DLSS/FSR integration itself varies by game, and I play plenty of non-AAA titles that either don't have the setting altogether, or commit grave sins such as upscaling GUI elements.

What compromise? A game with 1080p internal resolution upscaled to 4k with DLSS on a 4k monitor looks way better than 1080p native on a 1080p monitor.

If the game implements upscaling correctly. Even then, I'm not a big fan of using upscaling myself, I'm not sure why.

I like spending $1,500 on a graphics card so I can re-use my existing $4,000 4k monitor to play pong.

My entire computer costed $999. The GPU is probably around $400 of that.

The 4k monitor I'm using costed $70. It's a cheap aluminum enclosure around a laptop panel.

What application are you using?

It's called "Lossless Scaling" and you can find it on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/993090/Lossless_Scaling/

You have to buy it and then switch the branch to version 1.6, because the new UWP version doesn't work properly.

For one, it's about non high-end PCs. Also, you would wonder how many people hate high dpi screens.

Maybe, but I'd think a TV target would be 4K in 2023. "1080p gaming" doesn't usually mean an exact target so much as "not powerful enough for more".

Sounds more like they're targeting the good enough market. Mid-level PC gaming has moved on to 1440p, but budget builds could maybe use something like this.

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