Intel’s Arc A370M Is Great For Creators On-The-Go

Intel recently released the first members of its new Arc family of GPUs, the A350M and A370M. Representing the mobile faction of the Arc lineup, these two GPUs will mostly be found in laptops. Intel has already scored design wins with ASUS, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and others, which is not surprising given the strength of Intel’s laptop platform. Intel is positioning the A370M as a GPU for creator workloads with some light gaming. In other words, it should be particularly great for accelerating media workloads but still do fine in light gaming scenarios and casual titles. The A370M also leverages Intel’s Xe HPG microarchitecture and was manufactured with TSMC’s N6 node.

For the last month I’ve had the opportunity to use this new GPU in a pre-production Intel Arc 3 development notebook, which Intel sent me to review in my capacity as an industry analyst. The system itself has nice specs, with an i7-12700H CPU and 32GB of RAM and 1TB SSD, all while displayed on a 16” 1600P display. This is a contender for a nice thin creator notebook even though it is just a development machine.

Media creation and editing benchmarks

Given its positioning, most of my testing of the Arc A370M machine centered around the GPU’s capabilities in creator workflows and some light gaming scenarios. If it were a higher-end GPU, I probably would have tested gaming more thoroughly. For my creativity workload benchmarks, I used different versions of PugetBench with the popular DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro programs.

Running DaVinci Resolve 18, the A370M scored an average of 535 points, compared to the RTX A2000 (RTX 3050 Ti) in my Surface laptop, which scored 513. That said, the CPUs in these laptops are not the same; the A370M development laptop scored 54 in 4K media, while the Surface Studio Laptop scored 19. As far as GPU effects go, the RTX 3050 Ti may have outperformed the A370M with a score of 24 to the A370M’s 15. However, these numbers don’t necessarily tell the story as well as the total score given that DaVinci Resolve has Intel Deep Link support which includes Hyper Encode. Deep Link allows the CPU and GPU to work together to encode a workload, which boosted the fusion score from 88 to 93. This in turn increased the total score from 523 to 535. In the near future, as more apps start to enable CPU and GPU-accelerated encoding like Deep Link, it will become harder to compare systems.

In Photoshop the performance of the A370M was most impressive—an overall score of 1168 and a GPU score of 111.7. These numbers put the A370M development notebook into competition with other notebooks on the Puget public benchmark results, including a Lenovo system with the same CPU and a RTX 3060 GPU (with 1272 points total and a GPU score of 122.8). While the A370M didn’t beat it, it did come considerably closer to a 3060 than I expected. It did, however, beat the A2000 in my Surface Laptop Studio, which only put up a GPU score of 60.

On Premiere Pro, the Arc 3 development notebook came back with a total score of 591 and a GPU score of 30. This puts the A370M ahead of the NVIDIA RTX 3050 in most results, but behind the 3060 in others. The A2000 inside my Surface Laptop Studio, which is basically a 3050 Ti in terms of performance, scored almost the same GPU score of 30, putting it about on par with the A370M for performance in Premiere Pro. These GPUs will most likely go up against each other in this category, so Intel should be able to stay competitive with NVIDIA in the creator space.

As you can tell, performance can vary from app to app. It’s worth it to dive deep on these benchmarks to see how your GPU will fare with the specific programs you use regularly. For the most part, the A370M is doing quite well and keeping up with the competition.

Gaming Experience

I spent less time gaming on this machine than using it for photo and video editing, since that was the expressed purpose of this chip at launch. However, I was able to easily play a few games at medium and low settings, albeit not at the full resolution (1440P). In F1 2022, running at 1080P on medium settings, I was able to get an average of 55 FPS—an enjoyable casual experience. For a more graphically intensive game, like Elden Ring, I was able to get about 45 FPS at 1080P on Medium settings. While this isn’t necessarily the highest of frame rates, it is very playable and doesn’t stutter or lag. One of my favorite casual games to play—I mean benchmark—is Rocket League. Since Rocket League is a much less graphically intense game, I was able to crank it up to high graphical presets and still got an average of about 95 FPS. Nowadays, Rocket League pretty much runs on everything, so the high frame rate wasn’t much of a surprise.

Conclusion

In general, the Arc A370M has impressed me with its performance, especially in the creative apps benchmarked above. While it may not necessarily be the best gaming part out there, it does a good job of enabling casual gaming experiences and supplies ample GPU horsepower to the user. I am excited to see what Intel has done with Deep Link and hope to see more creative apps support it in the future. Since I ran the A370M on a development notebook, I am hopeful that we will see even better results with the many upcoming OEM laptops featuring the chip. Those should be landing in consumers’ hands any day now, so stay tuned.

Note: Moor Insights & Strategy writers and editors may have contributed to this article.

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