Intel's first entry-level discrete GPU holds its own against NVIDIA's RTX 3050.

It’s finally happening.

After several years of teases, leaks, hints, and one extremely soft desktop graphics card, Intel’s debut Arc discrete GPUs are finally arriving in mainstream notebooks like the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro and Lenovo Slim 7i.

But how well do they perform? To find out, I paid a visit to Intel’s Jones Farm campus in Portland, Oregon, where Intel invited me to put an Arc A370M reference laptop (based off MSI’s Summit E16 Flip Evo) through the wringer. I was given a little more than an hour to test Intel’s entry-level GPU using benchmarks of my choosing, in a similar arrangement to our recent early performance preview for 12th-gen Core i9 laptop processors.

Bottom line? Intel might just be getting started in discrete graphics, but Arc’s results are already impressive.