NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 vs Intel Arc A530M vs Intel Arc A350M

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 is a mid-range desktop graphics card. It is based on the GA106 Ampere chip and offers 8 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 128 Bit memory bus. It offers 2,560 cores and supports PCIe 4.0.

The performance is similar to the older GeForce RTX 2060 and therefore best suited for 1080p gaming of modern and demanding games in high settings.

The GA106 chip offers 3,840 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 1,920 INT32 ALUs). With Turing all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formats now including AV1).

The GA106 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip). The TDP of the RTX 3050 is specified at 130 Watt and therefore better than the previous RTX 2060 (160 Watt).

Intel Arc A530M

The Intel Arc A530M (device ID 5697) is a dedicated mobile lower- mid-range graphics card for laptops based on Xe HPG microarchitecture. It uses the ACM-G12 chip and offers 12 of the 16 Xe-cores (192 ALUs), 12 ray tracing units and a 128-bit memory bus for 8 GB GDDR6 graphics memory. The cores can clock from 300 MHz (low frequency mode) to 1300 MHz (high frequency) or in short bursts 2050+ MHz (short bursts / Turbo).

The performance of the Arc A530M should be slightly below the older Arc A550M (more cores but less clock speed).

The chip also integrates two media engines for VP9, AVC, HEVC, and AV1 8k en- and decoding. The 4 display pipes support up to 4x 4k120 HDR via DMI 2.0B or DisplayPort 2.0 10G. 

The A530M is produced in 6nm at TSMC (N6 process) and supports dynamic power share (using Deep Link) with 12th gen Intel CPUs (Alder Lake).

Intel Arc A350M

The Intel Arc A350M is a dedicated mobile entry level graphics card for laptops based on Xe HPG microarchitecture. It uses the ACM-G11 chip and offers 6 of the 8 Xe-cores (95 ALUs), 6 of the 8 ray tracing units and a 64-bit memory bus for 4 GB GDDR6 graphics memory. The chip integrates 7.2 billion transistors and the die measures 157 mm2.

The chip also integrates two media engines for VP9, AVC, HEVC, and AV1 8k en- and decoding. The 4 display pipes support up to 4x 4k120 HDR via DMI 2.0B or DisplayPort 2.0 10G. 

The A350M is produced in 6nm at TSMC (N6 process) and supports dynamic power share (using Deep Link) with 12th gen Intel CPUs (Alder Lake).