Intel ARC 380 may be a good budget option for FHD/1080p builds

[tedlogan12]

I'm building a mini cabinet for a friend of mine (not charging, don't worry, it is a friend-only build) and bought an Intel ARC A380 card (the ASRock Challenger 6gb, currently $120). For 1080p, it seems to run really well. My house is currently a mess (I have four dogs, and it is pretty much always reflective of that), but I made a video to show it doing well. I call it the A360 in the video, but it's the A380 - I'm just not too familiar with Intel's numbers to care enough yet.

Here's the video of me playing the VPW 64 bit Big Bang Bar on it. Again, apologies for the state of my house. (I couldn't flip with the left flipper because my hand was holding my phone).

The build is:

1. AMD Ryzen 5 4500 (~$85 USD), which includes the CPU fan
2. ASRock B450M/AC (~$80 USD)
3. 16gb RAM (~$30 USD)
4. 512gb SSD (~$30 USD)
5. ASRock Challenger A380 6gb (~$120 USD)
6. Cheapo 600w power supply (~$40)
7. 27" IPS playfield (extra)
8. 24" IPS backglass (extra)
9. VSDisplay 12.6" screen as the DMD/works for FullDMD as the resolution is high enough that Batman, GOTG, Blood Machines, Iron Maiden all still look good. (~$150)

I wouldn't push it to 4k, but for someone who would be happy with FHD, it seems like it does pretty darn well.

[tedlogan12]

I wanted to share this mostly because many have expressed a lot of concern about how well a GPU that doesn't natively support Direct X 9 (it uses its drivers to transform all earlier DirectXs to 12, and VPX is DirectX 9-based), but it appears that Intel has done a very good job with its drivers. This video was shot using the March 2023 drivers, and they seem to be very solid in doing what VPX does. I've tried all of VPW's tables now and had no issue with any of them, and Dapishbowl's Batman '66 and GoTG have both run really well.