Some early reviews of Intel's A380 gaming GPU have started to appear online, and the general consensus so far is that they are OK if you're looking to game at 1080p. For the most part. The problem with them is, that they're not consistent, especially with older games not running DX12 or Vulkan. There are some unique performance characteristics, though, which should give these GPUs a real fine wine appeal, and decent out of the box performance from day one.
Intel has been teasing a major desktop GPU release for some time, and though there have been some mobile launches and some early sample testing on PC, nothing much has been readily available. With Intel reluctant to send out samples, some reviewers have purchased or "acquired" their own cards through intriguing means, and we now have some early performance results. They're not half bad.
While there are a great number of what Intel calls "Tier 1" games which perform very well, at the least as good as entry-level GPUs like the RX 6400 and GTX 1650, but there are some problematic GPU issues. Drivers are a mess and still being worked on, with a lot more to still do to bring the card up to par, but it's a good start at least.
It's just a shame these cards weren't available six months or a year ago, when just about any entry level GPU would have done. Especially at a low price, which is what these cards will sell at.
One thing's for sure, though, you need to enable Resizeable BAR to get halfway decent performance out of these cards. With it switched on, they can compete with much more impressive cards, but without it, it's a bloodbath.
Definitely don't run out and buy one of these cards just yet, but the potential is there for them to fill an important entry-level niche, especially as AMD and Nvidia get hyped for their new, super powered next-gen GPUs this fall.
Image Source: ComputerBase
