Intel Arc A380 Graphics Card Gets A 7.5% Clock Speed Boost With Latest Firmware Update [Updated]

Intel Arc A380 Graphics Card Gets A 7.5% Clock Speed Boost With Latest Firmware Update 1

Updated: Intel reached out to confirm that the increased clock speed is a bug and will be corrected in the next update.

"In a recent driver update, we changed the reported graphics clock of the A380. Actual performance and frequency were not affected and we are working on an update to revert the change in a future driver update. - Intel Spokesperson"

Intel's recent Arc GPU drivers have delivered some major performance improvements but they also silently give a clock speed boost to the Arc A380 graphics card through the latest firmware upgrade.

Update: It looks like the previous driver incorrectly reported the clock speeds of the Intel Arc A380 GPU and that has been fixed in the latest driver release.

As reported by Neowin, one of their forum members noticed that his Intel Arc A380 graphics card ran at much higher clock speeds after upgrading to the latest firmware. Now the latest firmware is not mentioned to host any specs upgrades & mainly lists down stability improvements, better fan behavior, bug fixes, and better compatibility with HDMI connections.

However, looking at the GPU-z between the older driver/firmware and the newer install, Eternal Tempest (Neowin Forum Member) saw the clock speeds of his Intel Arc A380 graphics card go up from 2000 MHz to 2150 MHz. This is a +7.5% increase in clock speed and as a result, the card also saw an improvement to its pixel and texture fillrate which boosted from 64 GPixel/s and 128 GTexel/s to 68.8 GPixel/s & 137.6 GTexel/s.

In addition to the upgraded specs, the software is also said to report the firmware upgradation process properly to users so that they don't reset or turn off their system during the process. The graphics card used here was the ASRock variant of the Arc A380 which should be the low-profile variant since it's running at 2000 MHz out of the box as the other variant "Challenger ITX" clocks in at 2250 MHz. This clock speed bump should provide a little boost to performance which may not be noticeable in all games but it's still a welcome one.

Currently, the Arc A380 retails for a starting price of just $99 US which makes it a really good option for entry-level PC builds with AV1 support and XeSS features. It remains to be seen if the other Arc cards also get a similar clock speed bump of if this is only limited to the entry-level graphics cards.