40 PCWorld JUNE 2022REVIEWS TESTED: ARC A370M
preset, which sets ray tracing to its lowest
“normal” setting and uses hybrid reflections
instead of fully ray-traced reflections.
The Intel Arc A370M beats the Iris Xe by
an infinite percentage because, well, the Iris
Xe doesn’t meet the game’s minimum system
requirements. Metro Exodus Enhanced
Edition is unusual because ray tracing is
required to run the game at all. That leaves
the Iris Xe out in the cold of nuclear winter.
The Arc A370M slugs it out with the HP
Spectre x360 16 with RTX 3050 graphics and
ultimately loses by three frames per second.
That reflects a 15 percent performance
advantage for the RTX 3050, and hints that
the Arc A370M may fall slightly behind in ray
tracing relative to Nvidia’s hardware.
Acer’s Nitro 5 with an RTX 3060 once
again stomps everything else in the field,
beating both the Arc A370M and RTX 3050
machines by a threefold margin. This
thumping may have something to do with the
more limited 4GB of video memory available
on the Arc A370M and RTX 3050, comparedto 6GB on the RTX 3060. Ray tracing is
notoriously memory intensive.TOPAZ VIDEO ENHANCE AI
The last test is different—a content creation
workload. Topaz Video Enhanced AI is a tool
that can upscale or improve the quality of
video clips. I’ve used Topaz Video Enhance
AI to upscale videos for my own YouTube
channel, Computer Gaming Yesterday (fave.
co/3FLY4oo), and I’ve found discrete
graphics can provide a serious lift in this
app’s performance.
One quirk to note is that I ran this test
using Topaz’s experimental multi-GPU
support. Intel collaborated with Topaz to
make this feature work with Intel hardware.
Intel Arc systems can use both the Arc
discrete graphics and Xe integrated graphics
simultaneously, one of the unique and
intriguing “Deep Link” features (fave.
co/3lf4i6Q) offered by Intel Arc laptops with
Intel Core processors. I did try using this
experimental feature with the Nvidia laptops I
had for comparison, in which case the NvidiaLONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCEMSI Summit E16 Flip EvoIntel A370M Reference
MSI Summit E14 Flip Intel Iris Xe Reference
HP Spectre x360 16Nvidia RTX 3050
Acer Nitro 5 Nvidia RTX 30600196222Metro Exodus Enhanced
Edition: 1080p High
Frames per secondSHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCEMSI Summit E16 Flip EvoIntel A370M Reference
MSI Summit E14 Flip Intel Iris Xe Reference
HP Spectre x360 16Nvidia RTX 3050
Acer Nitro 5 Nvidia RTX 306048613 4105187Topaz Video Enhanced AI
Seconds