Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
The 1080p medium results give a nice boost to framerates, if you would rather have smoother gameplay over fancier graphics. Overall performance is typically around 50% higher, give or take, than 1080p ultra. While we don't do 1080p high testing, that's also an option in most games, with performance sitting between the ultra and medium results — and image quality often (but not always) looks basically identical when comparing high and ultra settings.
Overall, the Arc A580 still sits third from the bottom out of the selected GPUs for our testing, beating the RX 6600 and RTX 3050. It's also still about 10% behind the Arc A750, which based on current pricing would be the better deal right now for an extra $10.
Where all of the ray tracing games were still below 60 fps at 1080p ultra (and a few were even below 30 fps), now everything is clearly playable — assuming no driver oddities, of course. Intel has been pretty good about fixing the worst offenders, though, and major new releases usually get game ready drivers. With the continued improvements in DX11 support and performance, Intel's drivers are now in a far better position than they were when Arc first launched.
Our rasterization test suite puts the Arc A580 in second to last place, with the RX 6600 now surpassing it. AMD's Infinity Cache provides bigger gains at 1080p medium, particularly on cards like the RX 6600/7600, and Intel's Arc GPUs seem to hit other bottlenecks — the A750 is only 7% faster than the A580 here.
We should also note that there was at least on performance regression in our test suite compared to prior testing. Watch Dogs Legion ran almost 20% faster on the Arc A750 back in June. We've notified Intel of the drop in performance, and hopefully things get restored. That only impacted 1080p medium settings, though — 1080p ultra and higher resolutions weren't affected.
All of the games here easily cleared 60 fps as well. A Plague Tale: Requiem was the lowest performing of the group at just 68 fps, while everything else managed at least 90 fps and six of the games broke 100 fps. Obviously, having a higher refresh rate 1080p display would be beneficial here, and adaptive sync / VRR (variable refresh rate) is a great option as well. Also, yes, Intel Arc GPUs support VRR — though not on monitors that use a G-Sync module.
1080p medium with ray tracing does a lot better than maxed out settings with ray tracing. Almost everything now clears 30 fps, though Cyberpunk 2077 still comes up short. FSR2 would fix that, or alternatively use lower RT settings — or just turn RT off and you'll get substantially higher performance.
Because ray tracing tends to be so demanding, the overall charts at 1080p medium look nearly identical to the 1080p ultra charts. Or put another way, every game is fully GPU limited, even at 1080p medium, with ray tracing enabled.
- MORE: Best Graphics Cards
- MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
- MORE: All Graphics Content
