It’s finally happening.
After years of teasing, leaks, hints, and one extremely bland desktop graphics card, the debut discrete Intel Arc GPUs are finally showing up in mainstream laptops like the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro and Lenovo Slim 7i.
But how well do they work? To find out, I visited the Intel Jones Farm campus in Portland, Oregon, where Intel invited me to run the Arc A370M reference laptop (based on the MSI Summit E16 Flip Evo) through the spin cycle. I was given just over an hour to test the entry-level Intel GPU using my chosen benchmarks, similar to our recent 12th Gen Core i9 laptop processor benchmark benchmark test.
bottom line? Intel may be just getting started with discrete graphics, but Arc’s results are already impressive.
3DMark Time Spy
We start with 3DMark Time Spy, the classic synthetic graphics benchmark that PCWorld often uses to evaluate the performance of everything we see on our test rig.
The Intel Arc A370M scored 4405 in 3DMark Time Spy. This is almost two and a half times faster than the Intel Iris Xe, which is a significant advantage that certainly puts the Arc A370M in a different performance class.
Matt Smith/IDG
Of course, entry-level discrete GPUs are the real problem, and here the Arc A370M doesn’t fall short. That’s about 15 percent faster than the Nvidia RTX 3050 as tested on the HP Specter x360 16, and is essentially related to the Asus Vivobook Pro 15 OLED, which again features the Nvidia RTX 3050.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Arc A370M lags behind the more discrete mid-range graphics options found in laptops explicitly designed for gaming. The RTX 3050 Ti in the MSI GF76 Katana is just under 50 percent faster, and the Acer Nitro 5 with RTX 3060 almost doubles the performance of the Arc A370M in this test.
Final Fantasy XIV: The Endwalker Test
Playtests start with Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker. This isn’t a test that’s typically done at PC World, but given that the Arc A370M is an entry-level discrete offering, I thought testing an old popular game without cutting-edge features might provide some insight. After all, many people (myself included) spend more time playing these games than they do Cyberpunk 2077 or Metro Exodus.
Matt Smith/IDG
In this test, the performance of the Intel Arc A370M is just under 50 percent faster than the Intel Iris Xe graphics with 96 EU. This is a much smaller gain than 3DMark Time Spy, but still large enough to substantially improve the real world experience. The Iris Xe just handles 1080p and High (Desktop) settings, while the A370M runs pretty smoothly.
Intel’s reference laptop with the Arc A370M is slightly behind the HP Specter x360 16 with the RTX 3050 in this test, but the difference in victory is so small it’s not even. I doubt most gamers will see any real difference when playing Final Fantasy XIV on every system.
Of course, the Acer Nitro 5 is in a different realm, as expected given its use of the Nvidia RTX 3060. This kind of mid-range discrete GPU allows gamers to aim well beyond 60fps and benefit from a high refresh rate display.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is now four years old, believe it or not, but it remains a great game to gauge how well a PC will handle the most compelling games of the “last generation” console era.
Matt Smith/IDG
The Intel Arc A370M provides a significant gain over the Iris Xe here, approaching 60fps on average. Iris Xe can’t really handle this game at 1080p and max settings, struggling with an unacceptable average of 21 (with many dips in mid-teens).
The Arc A370M also outperforms the HP Specter x360 16 with Nvidia RTX 3050 by over 15 percent, which is more than I expected. That’s a nice boost that shows the Arc A370M can actually outperform entry-level Nvidia graphics in some situations.
Once again, the Acer Nitro 5 with RTX 3060 shows the difference between a regular entry-level discrete graphics laptop and a “true” gaming laptop, easily outperforming all the competition.
Metro Exodus Expanded Edition
Finally, we come to Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, the most demanding game I’ve tested and the only game I’ve tested ray tracing on. Even then, I only used the High graphics preset, which sets ray tracing to its lowest “normal” setting and uses hybrid reflections instead of full ray tracing reflections.
Matt Smith/IDG
Intel Arc A370M beats Iris Xe by an infinite percentage because Iris Xe doesn’t meet the game’s minimum system requirements. Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is unusual in that it requires ray tracing at all to run the game. This leaves Iris Xe in the cold of a nuclear winter.
The Arc A370M is outperformed by the HP Specter x360 16 with RTX 3050 graphics and ends up losing three frames per second. This reflects the RTX 3050’s 15 percent performance advantage and hints that the Arc A370M may be slightly behind in ray tracing compared to Nvidia’s hardware.
The Acer Nitro 5 with RTX 3060 once again outperforms everyone else in this area, outperforming the Arc A370M and RTX 3050 machines by a threefold margin. This bump may have something to do with the more limited 4GB of VRAM available on the Arc A370M and RTX 3050 compared to the 6GB on the RTX 3060. Ray tracing is notoriously memory intensive.
Topaz Video Enhance AI
The last test is different – the content creation workload. Topaz Video Enhanced AI is a tool that can upscale or enhance the quality of video clips. I used Topaz Video Enhance AI to upscale videos for my own YouTube channel Computer Gaming Yesterday and found that discrete graphics can greatly improve the performance of this app.
One oddity to note is that I ran this test using Topaz’s experimental multi-GPU support. Intel has partnered with Topaz to make this feature work with Intel hardware. Intel Arc systems can use both discrete Arc graphics and integrated Xe graphics at the same time, which is one of the unique and intriguing “Deep Link” features offered by Intel Arc laptops with Intel Core processors. I tried this experimental feature with my existing Nvidia laptops for comparison, in which case the Nvidia GPU was paired with the integrated Iris Xe graphics, but this significantly reduced performance. So for these systems, the results below show performance when running on Nvidia GPU only.
Matt Smith/IDG
Comparing the Intel Arc A370M with the Iris Xe shows the advantage of using even entry-level discrete graphics for content creation. The Arc A370M cuts through a sample clip almost four times faster than the Iris Xe laptop. This can literally save you hours if you want to scale video files longer than a few minutes.
The Arc A370M was about 40 percent faster than the HP Specter x360 16 with Nvidia RTX 3050 graphics. This is a very significant win. The Arc outperforms the RTX 3050 here by a larger margin than in other benchmarks, showing that Intel’s hardware is taking full advantage of experimental multi-GPU support.
How We Tested
These tests were performed on reference Intel Arc A370M laptops located on the Intel Jones Farm campus. I was given access to not one, but five identical reference systems, which meant I could repeat test runs many times to verify results. The results here are averages of the systems tested.
Intel also provided an Alder Lake reference system equivalent to the MSI Summit E14 Flip for comparison with the Intel Iris Xe graphics. Other systems tested, including the HP Specter x360 16 and Acer Nitro 5, are test systems not provided by Intel. The Intel and HP Specter x360 16 reference platforms were set to “performance” power management, while the Acer Nitro 5 was set to the default setting.
Here is a summary of the settings for each test.
- 3DMark Time Spy: Standard demo of Time Spy with default settings.
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider: DX12 1080p Max settings, ray tracing off, TAA on.
- Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker: 1080p at maximum settings (desktop).
- Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition: 1080p at high performance settings.
- Topaz Video Enhance AI: An eight-second 1080p .MOV file has been upscaled to 4K using the Artemis medium quality AI model.
results
Intel
What most gamers and enthusiasts are interested in is very simple: Can you buy an Intel Arc laptop and expect Nvidia and AMD performance?
The answer seems to be yes.
These are good results for the Intel Arc A370M. The faster of the two discrete entry-level Intel GPUs seems to even match the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 found in various pro and enthusiast laptops (although early Arc laptops cost a lot more than RTX 3050 laptops). The Intel Arc A370M can easily handle “latest generation” 3D games and can greatly improve the performance of content creation applications that rely on the GPU.
The Arc A370M can’t match the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 in the Acer Nitro 5, but it’s not designed to compete in that segment. This task is entrusted to the Intel Arc A550M, which has twice the memory (8GB vs. 4GB) and twice as many Xe cores (16 vs. 8) compared to the Arc A370M. We’ll have to wait and see how the Arc A550M performs when it arrives this summer, but the math on the napkins suggests it could be on the heels of the RTX 3050 Ti and RTX 3060 laptops.
I’m happy with these numbers. The Intel Arc offers a third option for those looking for a thin, portable Windows laptop for gaming and content creation. Now let’s hope that Intel and system OEMs can turn the current stream of Arc-equipped computers into a stream.
Further reading Intel Arc: