Mind you, there is a slew of qualifiers here.
Comparative tests between AMD’s Radeon 6500M laptop GPU and Intel’s latest Arc A370M demonstrate that the former leaves the latter fairly in the dust.
Although we should take any comparisons made directly by a manufacturer with a grain of salt, here are AMD’s tweets detailing the results:
These two GPUs were put side by side in five different games to determine which one could provide the best overall performance at 1080p resolution and medium detail settings.
Compared to Intel’s Arc A370M, AMD’s GeForce GTX 1060 achieves from 88 fps to 135 fps in its best-case scenario, which is a significant improvement. There are certain instances where the 6500M is more than twice as quick as Intel’s GPU in F1 2021, yet AMD still has an advantage of 25 percent to 50 percent or more.
Analysis: Let’s use caution while dealing with these early performance indicators.
On the surface, this seems to be a huge gain for AMD. However, as we’ve previously indicated, there are several limitations here, so let’s take a closer look at them.
Starting with our previous mention of bias, a manufacturer offering benchmarks would obviously cherry-pick those results in order to portray their product in the most favourable light possible. This (in terms of games chosen, and perhaps settings used, or drivers).
The laptops’ setup and the rest of their hardware specifications remain a mystery. There’s little doubt that AMD rapidly acquired one of the first laptops to include the A370M, but what about the 6500M’s supporting components?
The A370M and 6500M were also configured with what kind of power levels? It’s not clear whether the 6500M was operating at 50W or the 35W base use of the Intel GPU, although the 6500M has a higher maximum power consumption (and getting better performance as a result). There are a number of factors, like the notebook’s capabilities and thermals, that must be taken into consideration when deciding how much power to feed the mobile GPU with.
There has been a mixed response to Intel’s first Arc GPUs in certain areas of the internet, fueled by leaks like the one uncovered by Tom’s Hardware that indicates the A370M is slower than Nvidia’s GTX 1050 Ti mobile GPU in 3DMark. Although we should be wary of any leaks, as usual, we should keep an eye out.
Remember, however, that Intel’s driver is still in its infancy, and performance will increase as the days go by in the early days of its existence. Only by putting Intel’s first Arc mobile GPUs through its paces, and gaining a comprehensive understanding of the competitive landscape, can we really know how well they perform.
Consider that Arc has other potential benefits like XeSS for improving frame rates and other advantages outside of games that certain users will benefit from (such as AV1 encoding).
Keep in mind that Intel’s two Arc 3 series laptop GPUs originally announced are also low-end goods, and we haven’t yet seen anything of Intel’s heavy guns and what they can do.