As we’ve just seen, Intel’s latest driver update, 101.4644 , didn’t just update the driver. In fact, it was accompanied by a firmware update, which made a number of changes to the cards’ behavior. Some even saw the frequency of their Arc A380 increase.
Arc A380, a 7.5% increase in frequency!
For the record, the Arc A380 is a small Intel graphics card in the entry-level sector. It features a DG2-128 GPU with 1024 processing units, 64 TMUs and 32 ROPs. The memory bus is 96-bit, while capacity is 6 GB in GDDR6. As a result, memory bandwidth is limited: not even 200 GB/s.
As for the GPU, it runs at a basic 2000 MHz, with pixel and texture fillrates of 64 GPixel/s and 128 GTexel/s respectively.
However, Intel’s latest driver update has changed all this. Yes, this update also brought a firmware update for the cards, which not only modified fan behavior. The little A380 also seems to be benefiting from a slight frequency boost.
Where the card used to run at 2000 MHz, it now runs at 2150 MHz, an increase of 7.5%. This improves pixel and texture throughput to 68.8 GPixel/s and 137.6 GTexel/s respectively. As a result, we can also expect a small increase in gaming performance, although this may not be perceptible in all titles.
This observation was made by a member of the Neowin forum on his card, an ASRock Callenger ITX model. This model can be found here in France for around €160 at its lowest price.
