NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (Desktop) vs Intel Arc A550M vs Intel Arc A750

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (Desktop)

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 is a fast desktop graphics card based on the Pascal architecture. It was announced in May 2016 and offers all 2,560 shader of the used GP104 chip. Furthermore, the GPU is coupled with 8 GB GDDR5X graphics memory using a 256 Bit interface (10 GHz, 320 GB/s). The chip is manufactured at TSMC in 16nm (FinFET). The TDP is specified at 180 Watt and therefore slightly higher than the predecessor, the GTX 980 with 165 Watt.

Intel Arc A550M

The Intel Arc A550M (device ID 5692) is a dedicated mobile lower- mid-range graphics card for laptops based on Xe HPG microarchitecture. It uses the ACM-G10 chip and offers 16 of the 32 Xe-cores (256 ALUs), 16 ray tracing units and a 128-bit memory bus for 8 GB GDDR6 graphics memory. The cores can clock from 300 MHz (low frequency mode) to 900 MHz (high frequency) or in short bursts 2050 MHz (short bursts / Turbo). The chip integrates 21.7 billion transistors, uses a BGA2660 package and the die measures 406 mm2.

The performance of the Arc A550M should be between the Radeon RX 6500M and 6600M and therefore well suited even for demanding games in medium to high detail settings and 1080p. The slower Arc A370M is based on the smaller ACM-G11 chip and should be significantly slower.

The chip also integrates two media engines for VP9, AVC, HEVC, and AV1 8k en- and decoding. The 4 display pipes support up to 4x 4k120 HDR via DMI 2.0B or DisplayPort 2.0 10G. 

The A550M is produced in 6nm at TSMC (N6 process) and supports dynamic power share (using Deep Link) with 12th gen Intel CPUs (Alder Lake).

Intel Arc A750

The Intel Arc A750 is a mid-range desktop GPU and is manufactured using the 6 nm process at TSMC. The graphics processor has 3,854 shader units and 8 GB GDDR6 VRAM with a 256-bit interface (16 Gbps, 512 GB/s). This makes the Intel Arc A750 the second fastest graphics card model from Intel.

Features

Based on the Alchemist architecture, Intel's Arc A750 is the second fastest model in the series. Intel wants to put pressure on AMD and Nvidia with its graphics cards in the price range up to 250 euros. Features such as ray tracing are also supported and upscaling features such as XeSS can compete with DLSS and FSR. The Intel Arc A750 offers 448 tensor cores, which we already find in the current graphics cards from Nvidia. With support for AV1, the graphics card is particularly interesting for content creators. Only the Ada Lovelace models from Nvidia and the RDNA3 GPUs from AMD are currently capable of hardware-based encoding and decoding with the new codec.

Performance

The performance of the Intel Arc A750 is comparable with an AMD Radeon RX 7600 comparable. The Intel model copes much better with newer games. With ray tracing enabled, the Intel Arc A750 can even outperform the AMD Radeon RX 7600. Based on the performance shown, the Intel Arc A750 is well suited for 1080p gaming in 2023. 

Power consumption

The manufacturer puts the power consumption of the Intel Arc A750 at 225 watts (TGP). This is slightly more than a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 or the AMD Radeon RX 7600. In terms of efficiency, however, the Intel Arc A750 is not convincing. Intel needs to make some improvements here in order not to lose touch with the successor aka "Battlemage".