Until, literally the next day when 3DCenter.org called Intel’s bluff and tested both cards themselves. Turns out, the AMD offering is roughly on-par with Intel’s and not as weak as Intel was claiming. Moreover, that led to 3DCenter adjusting all of its performance estimates for the entire Arc desktop lineup, which was now expected to perform worse than reports previously suggested. Anyways, on the same day Intel launched the Arc A380, Chinese manufacturer GUNNIR also announced a custom variant of the card simultaneously. The card had a sleek dual-fan aesthetic and was a factory-overclocked model with higher TDPs and better cooling, but, strangely, one particular thing was worse in comparison to the reference design. See, Intel’s own specifications for their reference Arc A380 listed the memory specs as 6GB of GDDR6 clocked at 16GB/s. However, GUNNIR’s card, a supposedly better version of the reference model, actually only had 15.5GB/s modules, which would prevent the card from reaching its stated 192GB/s memory bandwidth.
Arc A380 updated specs
Well, today, things have come to light and now we understand why GUNNIR’s aftermarket variant has slower memory. It’s because Intel listed the incorrect specs on their own website for the Arc A380 GPU. The card officially has 15.5GB/s memory modules, not 16GB/s. The company has now quietly updated the specs of the card overnight. With this change, the Arc A380 now has a memory bandwidth of 186GB/s. GUNNIR’s specifications were actually right and it was Intel who messed up on their end. Regardless, this is a minute change that shouldn’t bring about drastic performance differences in any way.
HDMI 2.1 clear-up
Aside from the memory mix-up, Intel also cleared another variable about the Arc A380. When the card was announced, the company boasted the 4 display outputs it had which were: 3x DisplayPort and 1x HDMI 2.0. After seeing this, over on Twitter, Coreteks asked Intel to include HDMI 2.1 in this segment of GPUs as well to outdo the competition. Intel has now swiftly replied, clearing up the confusion. Intel Arc A380 GPUs do, in fact, support the HDMI 2.1 spec but it’s actually up to the manufacturer or AIB to enable it. Therefore, the GUNNIR variant does not have it because the company decided to make that choice and cap the GPU at only HDMI 2.0.
— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) June 16, 2022 Hopefully, this was the last set of misinformation surrounding the Arc A380 that we have to cover. At this point, there have been two major errors from Intel’s side and one can only assume that these mistakes will not continue, especially considering just how vital this launch is for Intel. There is simply no room to fail.
