In the early market chatter from South Korea, Samsung appears to have rolled out Galaxy Book2 Pro notebooks equipped with Intel ARC A350 discrete graphics. Local tech blogs and testers have begun hands-on evaluations, sharing initial impressions that are shaping the early narrative for these machines in North American contexts.
Among the first test benchmarks circulating online, the mobile variant of the ARC A350 is compared against traditional portable GPUs, notably NVIDIA’s GTX 1650. In several scenarios, the ARC A350 falls short of the GTX 1650 on power-throttled laptops, where the thermal envelope is capped at 30 watts for the Intel solution and 50 watts for the Nvidia option. When both systems operate under identical constraints, the gap can narrow, but the ARC A350 still differentiates itself through its architecture and software features. A key differentiator is the ARC platform’s hardware-accelerated ray tracing, a capability that the GTX 1650 and MX450 generally do not offer. This distinction matters for lighted scenes and shadows in modern titles and rendering tasks, even if raw frame rates are similar in some games or workloads.
Industry-wide, Samsung isn’t alone in testing new Intel-based GPUs in premium ultrabooks. Other brands, including Acer, have faced delays in bringing Intel-powered models to market. The Acer Swift X, for instance, has not yet started shipping, with current projections suggesting availability will begin mid-June. Returning to Samsung, there are reports from North American buyers noting that some units arriving in the market still feature the older Iris Xe graphics. This pattern fits a broader trend where newly released models reach the domestic market first, creating a lag before equally configured units appear in international channels and retail shelves.
The conversation around these configurations is not isolated to Samsung alone. Early comparative benchmarks that align a contemporary ARC discrete GPU with competing offerings have already begun to surface in the community. In contemporary computer graphics conversations, this kind of cross-compatibility testing helps buyers understand real-world performance versus theoretical specs. It also helps set expectations for how these devices might behave with popular titles and workloads that rely on GPU acceleration. In the context of upcoming titles and continuing updates to driver support, the ARC A350 could show improvements over time, particularly in tasks that leverage ray tracing and modern shader models. This is an important piece of the broader hardware landscape in which consumers in the United States and Canada evaluate new laptops for work, school, and entertainment needs.
Source: VG Times