The first Intel Arc A370M GPU fails to impress in benchmarks and is known to have problems with gaming.
The A350M and A370M are the first of Intel’s Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs to hit the gaming market. These are laptop GPUs, but the business will be selling desktop graphics cards this year, and although it’s too early to know how that will play out, the Intel A370M is off to a rocky start.
Intel Arc Alchemist debut was tested against the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile by YouTube channel Benchmark Lab, as reported by our sister site Tom’s Hardware.
Is this what you came up with? GTX 1650 dominates every test, with a 15 to 20 percent edge across Red Dead Redemption 2, Flight Simulator 2020, and more.
To make matters worse, the comparison was skewed in favour of the A370M. As compared to the GTX 1650, the A370M was paired with a new Intel Core i7-12700H Alder Lake processor in the Samsung Galaxy Book 2 Pro.
Though the GTX 1650 isn’t a perfect match for the A370M, Tom’s Hardware points out that it’s not entirely fair. Despite the fact that both cards feature 1,024 shaders and 4GB of GDDR6 memory running at 12Gbps, the GTX 1650 has a faster base clock and a broader memory interface. While the XeSS AI scaling technology from Intel will not be ready until the summer, it will have a substantial impact on supported titles.
There are still issues concerning driver optimization after seeing such a big improvement in performance. Fortunately, this may be improved without making any changes to the hardware.
The initial batch of drivers for Intel Alchemist cards has a number of known difficulties in high-profile games, as noted in the release notes.
When it comes to glitchy textures, the most common complaint is that it makes games like Back 4 Blood and CrossFire look bad. However, other titles like Metro Exodus and Naraka: Bladepoint suffer from audio glitches that may be downright debilitating. It’s possible that Forza Horizon 5, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, and FIFA 22 may all “experience an application crash upon opening the game,” with Forza Horizon 5 being the most problematic.
These issues are clearly not good for Intel, so you’d expect them to be working hard to remedy them. I hope the next driver update has less known issues and a significant performance gain.