Overclocking enthusiast Pro Hi-Tech has released a YouTube video showing Intel’s new Arc A380 and how to do it. GPU works under “overclocking”.. This isn’t traditional GPU overclocking, just like approaching the best graphics cards, so I’ll enclose it in quotes. Surprisingly, the A380 showed significant performance improvements due to increased power limits and voltage offsets, and was almost completely placed in another GPU class.
The Pro Hi-Tech (if you don’t understand Russian like us, you’ll need to turn on autocaption and set the appropriate language) was a bit against the A380 in that it didn’t touch the core clock. I took an unusual approach. Jeez. He changed the power target and voltage offset of Intel’s proprietary graphics utility, which was set to 55% on the GPU Performance Boost slider and used a voltage offset of +0.255mv.
In testing, this gave the Arc A380 a GPU core overclock of 100-150 MHz, with an improvement of only 4-6%. However, power consumption increased from about 35W to about 50-55W, a significant increase of 43-57%. Is this another aspect of the Arc A380 that hinders performance? It certainly looks like that.
Pro Hi-Tech benchmarked the overclocked A380 in six games. Watch Dogs Legion, Cyberpunk 2077, Doom Eternal, God of War, Rainbow Six SiegeWhen World of tanks.. We have collected the results from the video and summarized them in the following table. Notice that ReBAR is enabled for all Arc tests and an overall performance line (geometric mean) is added. Also note that the GTX 1650 was a model that did not require additional power. That is, its performance can be at least a few percent slower than the more common GTX1650.
| Ark A380 stock | Ark A380OC | GTX 1650 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average (geometric mean) | 55.1 | 75.6 | 75.9 |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | 37 37 | 51 | 42 |
| Doom Eternal | 64 | 102 | 101 |
| God of War | 32 | 45 45 | 51 |
| Rainbow Six Siege | 126 | 172 | 181 |
| Watch Dogs Legion | 49 | 61 | 62 |
| World of tanks | 60 | 76 76 | 79 79 |
Profit in various games is in the range of about 25%. Watch Dogs Legion When World of tanksUp to 60% Doom Eternal.. Overall, using the geometric mean improved performance by 37% due to increased power limits and voltage offsets. This is a much bigger improvement than you would normally see with graphics card overclocking.
With “overclocking”, the ArcA380 replaces the batter with the GTX1650. Cyberpunk 2077Still 12% slow God of War, And close enough to a tie (within 5%) in the other four games tested. Of course, as we’ve noticed in other tests on the Arc A380, drivers and optimizations appear to be key performance factors.
The power consumption of the A380 looks very strange
At first glance, the Intel A380 seems to have a lot of overclocking headroom. However, there are some weird behaviors from the A380 that can result in “bulging” overclocking.
The biggest and most obvious problem is the result of power consumption. The official TDP for the Arc A380 is 75W on the Intel Arc website. The result of power consumption before and after Pro Hi-Tech’s “overclocking” is not even close to 75W. Inventory configurations routinely showed only 35W, but overclocked configurations did not well exceed the maximum, just below 55W.
I don’t know what’s going on here, but this could be one of the many issues that plague Intel’s ArcGPU at this time. I’ve heard a lot about driver optimization issues that slow down performance in most games. The benefits of enabling resizable bars also look very strange. Currently, power consumption can be less than half the rated level, which obviously results in poor performance.
Perhaps Intel was using China as a beta test area, and I have to wonder why Intel even bothered to launch the Arc A380 in its current state. Of course, the card would “leak” outside of China, which should have happened. Anyone can see the issues that Intel is currently working on to fix. Hopefully Team Blue can deal with these issues quickly, then we can move on to a global launch and hopefully have a much better experience.
