Intel Arc A380 by Gunnir

This sinking ship needs a better driver

- JARRED WALTON

AHOY THERE, mateys! Batten the hatches and prepare to set sail on Intel's Arc, its first proper graphics card in more than two decades. The maiden voyage got off to a rocky start, storms clouded the journey, and the captain seems to have lost his bearings. But can Arc weather the journey, or will all hands go down with the ship while chasing Moby Dick? Yarrrgh!

Enough of the pirate talk. At least the price isn’t terrible. If Intel had launched Arc at the beginning of the year, when GPUs were still nearly impossible to come by, it might have stood a chance. Except, even months after the cards first went on sale in China and half a dozen updates later, there are still plenty of driver kinks and issues.

Gunnir’s Photon model comes with a 2.45GHz factory overclock instead of Intel’s 2.0GHz reference clock. Or rather, Intel lists 2.0GHz as the average game clock; it’s not entirely clear how that correlates with Gunnir’s boost clock. The card also has a higher 92W power limit, which it hit during testing, so this is about as good as the A380 gets.