Quite a few laptop OEMs announced systems featuring Intel’s new Arc Alchemist dGPUs earlier this year, yet initial availability scheduled for this spring needed to be pushed into late Q2. It is now June and we were hoping to see at least a few laptops with the Arc dGPUs by now. Unfortunately, this is still not the case, although Forbes claims that the wait is “just about over,” as the publication managed to test an MSI reference system with an Intel Arc A370M. This particular dGPU model targets entry-level gaming systems, and, from what we can see in the Forbes benchmarks, the Arc A370M is quite capable in content creation loads, and it even manages to beat AMD’s new Radeon 680M dGPU in games.
The content creation benchmark suite used by Forbes included the Topaz Video Enhance AI, Blackmagic’s RAW Speed Test for 8K video rendering, and Adobe’s Premiere Pro. Intel’s Arc A370M managed to place first in the Topaz and Blackmagic tests, beating even Nvidia’s RTX 3050. For the Adobe test, the Intel chip placed second after the Nvidia GPU, but it was more than 100% faster compared to AMD’s Radeon 680M.
When it comes to games, the RTX 3050 is unbeatable, whereas Intel’s Arc A370M is not too far behind. Average performance is right between the RTX 3050 and the AMD Radeon 680M iGPU. However, if we look at the minimum framerate, especially when enabling ray tracing, the Intel chip is much closer to the RTX 3050. In this regard, it even beats it by 1 fps in Final Fantasy: Endwalker and is only a few fps behind in F1 2021.
Extrapolating such results for the more powerful A770M model, we could see Intel's top-of-the-line mobile dGPU delivering the best content creation performance for laptops, and at the same time offer gaming performance that ranges between an RTX 3060 and an RTX 3070. In the end, Intel’s price scheme will decide the viability of the new Arc dGPUs.