The Intel Arc 3 A380 has been available in the Chinese market for some time and was recently launched in the US. We’ve also seen various performance tests of this graphics card that place it in general at the GeForce GTX 1650 level in 1080pwhich means it is able to achieve playable speeds at the specified resolution with medium, high or maximum quality depending on the requirements of each game.

The analyzes that emerged focused mainly on performance, But what about driver-level compatibility and stability? This is a very important issue, especially after knowing the problems that the Intel Arc 3 A380 had at the driver level and compatibility with old APIs (DirectX 11 and below).

We know Intel is committed to improving the situation, but how does the Intel Arc 3 A380 perform in today’s hottest games, is it reliable and stable, or does it have serious issues? At PC Games Hardware, they conducted tests with a total 50 different games aimed at assessing these questionsand their results were very positiveas we can see in the attached table.

These tests used the latest patches for Windows 11 and all games were updated to the latest version available. They were also used Intel drivers 30.0.101.3268, so keep in mind that the experience with older software and drivers may not be as good. Looking at the results, we can see that we really only had serious issues with the Intel Arc 3 A380 when trying to play Max Payne 2, a title based on DirectX 8 it just doesn’t boot, i.e. it doesn’t work.

Out of 50 games tested, only 9 caused any problem, and only one of them, the aforementioned Max Payne 2, can be considered serious, since it was the only one that did not start. In others, we only have specific graphical glitches and other problems that in general they are minor and should be easy to fix with a simple driver update. The conclusion we can draw is very simple, these results are goodespecially considering that we are facing the first generation of dedicated graphics cards from Intel and the challenge that this presents for the chip giant.

Intel has significantly improved its drivers and is still working to resolve performance issues under APIs prior to DirectX 12. For DirectX 11, we expect Intel Arc Alchemist to improve performance under this API. in the future they will be as good as under DirectX 12. All of this is ultimately a matter of optimization, work that Intel takes very seriously and is actually starting to bear fruit.

We still don’t have a confirmed date from the chip giant, but the launch of the Intel Arc Alchemist 5 and 7 series will most likely happen. between September and October. These new graphics cards will be placed in the middle and upper class it will compete with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050, RTX 3060 and RTX 3070at least in theory, as we’ll have to wait for final (and independent) performance tests to see if they actually match these models.