Do Intel’s new graphics drivers actually overclock its low-end GPUs?

Enlarge / Intel’s latest Arc GPU drivers do come with a firmware update, but contrary to most reports, it’s not an “overclock.” (credit: Intel)

When we write about Intel’s Arc GPUs, we’re typically paying the most attention to the A750 and A770 because they’re the cards that perform well enough that you might actually put them in an entry-level-to-midrange gaming desktop. But there’s one other Arc graphics card of note: the lowly Arc A380, which snuck into some stores a few months before either high-end Arc card was released.

With its eight Xe cores (down from 32 in the A770), 96-bit memory interface, and 6GB of RAM, the Arc A380 has been (in my case, literally) nothing to write home about. It’s an entry-level graphics card that competes reasonably well with ancient and low-end cards like Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 1650 and AMD’s Radeon RX 6400, and its hardware-accelerated AV1 video encoding support makes it mildly interesting for people who work with video. It’s one of the better GPUs you can get for $100, its current street price, but that’s not saying much.

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  Pre-firmware update, HWInfo reports the clock speed at 2,000 MHz. [credit:
  Andrew Cunningham ]

But Intel’s latest graphics drivers provided an update specifically for the A380 that seems notable because of how rare it is: the 31.0.101.4644 driver package released last week also includes a firmware update for A380 cards that seems to boost their base clock speed from 2,000 MHz up to 2,150 MHz. That’s a 7.5 percent increase, supposedly being provided for free to all A380 owners with a simple firmware update. At least, it would be if it were an actual increase in the card’s peak clock speed, which it isn’t.