After months of rumors, teasers, speculation, and the semi-launch of the Arc A380 (opens in new tab), Intel has officially announced the Arc A310 graphics card (opens in new tab). It's not the RTX 40 killer we were hoping for, but it's something. Considering the amount of Arc coverage in the tech media over the past couple of years, this announcement comes as a surprise. Whether this is due to its modest nature or whether Intel intentionally went with a modest release is debatable. Nevertheless, such cards are not attractive to gamers, but they do exist in the market.

The A310 is not the kind of card you would buy to play Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K with ray tracing. In fact, it is not the kind of card you would use at 720p at minimum settings. Its specs indicate that it is designed to output a video signal for machines without integrated graphics.

Key features include six Xe cores, 4GB of GDDR6 memory on a 64-bit bus, a 2000MHz graphics clock, and a 75W TDP. This means it will compete with AMD's RX 6400 (open in new tab) and more powerful CPUs with integrated graphics. There should also be a low-profile option. A full-height dual-slot cooler seems like overkill, but assuming partners launch their own versions, a dual-slot card is a certainty.

I should not tease this little card. Even if its usefulness is limited, the card has some impressive key features. According to the official specifications, the A310 supports DisplayPort 2.0, a feature that even the mighty RTX 4090 (open in new tab) lacks. It also supports AV1 (open in new tab) encoding and decoding. The competing AMD RX 6400 does not even support AV1 decoding. Add to that support for H.264 and H.265 encoding and decoding and HDMI 2.1, and the little A310 looks like an impressive little home theater PC graphics card. [At the time of this writing, pricing and availability are unknown. In fact, it is possible that the card will not be sold at retail and will be found in basic OEM office machines like those from Dell and HP. [The market for entry-level graphics cards is shrinking, especially since AMD's new Ryzen 7000 series CPUs (open in new tab) all have basic integrated graphics, and Intel's non-F CPUs have for generations. Perhaps the release of such a card is something of a test case. Let the driver basics work first, and worry about game optimization later; Intel's low-key approach makes sense as long as there is no hope of competing on merit with Nvidia's RTX 40 series or AMD's next-generation RDNA 3 cards.