Introduction

Sparkle Arc A580 Orc is an affordable mainstream graphics card for 1080p gaming, based on the new and unexpected desktop GPU launch by Intel just a week before it updates its desktop processor lineup in a big way. The new A580 is a bold move by Intel given that it’s the first consumer graphics launch by the company in the aftermath of next-generation GPU launches by both NVIDIA and AMD. Intel has an interesting proposition for the segment of desktop PC users that’s entering the PC gaming market—to offer 1080p gaming experience with high-to-maximum settings at more than acceptable framerates. The best part? The A580 starts at just $180.

The Arc A580 is based on the Xe-HPG Alchemist graphics architecture, the same one that powers the Arc A750 and A770. This architecture is modern by all measures, as it meets the full DirectX 12 Ultimate feature-set, including real time ray tracing, and is backed by Intel’s very capable XeSS upscaling technology. Xe-HPG also has feature-packed AI acceleration hardware in the form of the XMX cores, which accelerate XeSS, but can also be programmed to accelerate consumer AI workloads. Lastly, Xe-HPG offers hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding of AV1 and HEVC media formats, and its display engine supports some of the latest display standards.

The new Arc A580 is based on the same 6 nm ACM-G10 silicon that powers the Arc 7-series. The A580 has been carved out of this silicon by enabling 24 out of 32 Xe Cores physically present on the silicon, which results in 75% of the chip’s number crunching machinery being enabled—384 execution units worth 3,072 unified shaders, 384 XMX cores for AI acceleration, 24 Ray Tracing units, 192 TMUs, and 96 ROPs.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect about the A580 is that its memory sub-system is carried over unchanged from the A750—you get 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus, and a memory speed of 16 Gbps, which yields the segment-highest memory bandwidth of 512 GB/s. Unlike other cards in the segment, the A580 does not have a truncated PCIe interface, you get the full PCI-Express 4.0 x16, which should help give you uncompromising performance on platforms with older PCIe Gen 3, however, those older platforms are required to have Resizable BAR enabled, without which there will be a significant drop in performance.

Why Intel decided to launch the A580 now can best be theorized on two fronts—gaming graphics card prices are on the cool, and 1080p-class graphics cards are now firmly back under the $250-mark, which allows Intel to undercut cards such as GeForce RTX 3050 and Radeon RX 6600 at an attractive $180 price. Secondly, a lot of water has flown under the northbridge since the October 2022 launch of the Arc A770, Intel has made huge strides in improving the software backbone of its Arc graphics cards, with massive gains for DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 titles that mainly include competitive e-sports titles. The company also vastly improved frame-times besides raw performance through driver updates.

Sparkle is a the most recent addition to Intel’s small but hopefully growing list of custom-design board partners. The brand comes from the house of TUL Corporation, an electronics ODM giant that also owns the popular AMD Radeon board partner PowerColor. The A580 Orc is designed to give gamers everything they want out of an A580, at Intel’s baseline price of $180. It also comes with a refreshing blue colored PCB.