Early thoughts on Intel ARC

[tyl0413]

There's a benchmark on Gamers Nexus already and additional info on LTT, what everyone think about the cards so far?
My thoughts:
The A380 performance is terrible, it barely manages to beat the 1050 TI which cost the same 6 years ago while requiring extra power which a card of this tier shouldn't, many 1050 Tis don't, RX6400 doesn't (tho it's more expensive).
All of the cards are basically built for Vulkan and DX12, so all old games on older APIs will run significantly worse, but it gets better as in the LTT video they said there's 3 categories they sort the games into, 1 is DX12/Vulkan that actually run well on ARC, so I assume they focus on making all the big AAA games run well so the card look nice on benchmarks, 2nd every other DX12/Vulkan game that they don't care about, 3rd is everything on older APIs.
So even for DX12/Vulkan it's not guaranteed you'll have a good experience.
All the cards require Re-bar, if unavailable performance is impacted badly.
A380 uses PCIe 4x8 so basically even worse performance on anything but the newest PCs, if we're unlucky enough they'll make all the other ones 4x8 too just like AMD did with the 6500 which reduced it's performance quite a bit.
If i remember that should be all the negatives aside obviously pricing and availability which gonna be the main deciding factor if they're even worth thinking about.
Only positive I see is AV1 encode IF it actually gonna take off which will take years and might not even happen but if it does the A380 would be useful in a Plex server but all next gen GPUs are likely to support AV1 encode anyways.

So what you end up with is a card with beta drivers, worse performance on most games than it would be otherwise capable of, requires a nearly brand new PC?

It's good there's an extra choice as even if it's gonna be completely trash people will buy it anyways so there's more nvidia and amd cards remaining for everyone else so that's a plus but I'd rather it be actually good and unless in it's current state they will be significantly cheaper while delivering better performance in at least DX12/Vulkan they could be worth it or they fix the DX11- performance, have PCIe 3x16 (or 4x16 since extra bandwidth isn't used anyways so it won't cripple 3 systems performance) and are still priced at least a bit lower than the competition i honestly don't really understand who these products will be for. Surprised to see so much positivity in the comments of these videos, I too wish it was good and put nvidia in check finally so they stop abusing their monopoly to raise prices and downgrade their software but from the limited information available currently it doesn't look too good to me, hopefully by launch the drivers and DX11 performance will be fixed and the higher end models won't suffer from the issues of the A380 while being reasonably priced.

[Agent]

Messaggio originale di Snakub Plissken:

Messaggio originale di Bezos:

I do wonder if Apple will be able to improve their GPU's further. Having more competition from Apple in the gaming scene would be interesting to see.

Nothing is impossible, but I've never seen anything that suggests PC games on Mac is a priority for Apple. And even during peak Mac gaming, it seemed to be in a negative spiral of not enough Mac gamers, and Mac hardware not really being focused on gaming. And the cost of upgrades or gaming capable hardware being available on Apple being pretty cost prohibitive.

Mac gamers are always holding out hope that they're an important part of gaming and I've got nothing against it. But I've been hearing about it for twenty years and it's always been hit or miss at best from my perspective. And in the midst of migration to ARM, and what apple did to 32bit support... and how that's affected games, not to mention the end of OpenGL support, I'm not sure where Mac gamer optimism comes from, especially in the short term of the next few years.

But to be fair I've never owned a Mac. The wife did when we were dating and trying to update it for gaming in 2011 was an exercise in expensive futility. So I have some biases and dated understanding of the Mac perspective. maybe it's not that bad. But it doesn't seem comparable to what I've come to expect being a PC gamer.

There would have to be radical change for Mac to be a relevant contender in PC gaming that's for sure.

I know their M1 chips have excellent CPU performance and efficiency giving great battery life to portable devices such as Macbooks. MacOS itself includes many more tools that just work out the box that many music producers, video editors, and such use.

Certainly the potential and hardware is there, but I think support and optimisation also needs improved for Mac PC gaming to really come back in the light.

[nullable]

The M1 chip is good. And I can't help but wonder how long before ARM CPU's make enugh headway into PC's proper to end x86 dominance.

My skepticism though is the Intel chips Apple were running were good too and being x86 made Mac gaming more realistic than ever and it never went anywhere. I'm not seeing how a new architecture, that may be years ahead of the curve, somehow brings a resurgence to Mac gaming. I'm just not sure what circumstance compels Apple to make it a major pillar of their computing products. And I'm not sure what compels PC gamers to pay double or triple in Apple tax for the privilege.

So yeah, I'd agree that a lot of things would have to radically change. I'm not sure they will, not in the short term. Fortunately forever is a long time. Who knows in 2122 maybe Apple is the king of gaming.

[ZeekAncient]

Speaking of ARM, I was one who excited when I heard that Nvidia was in the process of acquiring ARM. I figured it wouldn't be long before we saw Nvidia develop and release consumer CPUs.

Could you just imagine? All three, Nvidia, AMD, and Intel, making both GPUs AND CPUs. I think that would be awesome for the industry. Competition like that would only be good for us, the consumer. Not only would we see incredible innovation and advancements for both GPUs and CPUs, as all three would try to outdo each other to claim the performance crown, but I think it would prevent prices from getting too outrageous, as these companies would also try to undercut each other. For the most part.

That is why I was so excited to see Intel enter the GPU market. It didn't really matter how good they were. Just good enough. And functional. Unfortunately, releasing a mediocre product, that has driver and software issues, that is barely functional, would not be a good look for Intel. Back to the drawing board, or just nix the whole thing. I have to believe that is what the top brass at Intel are thinking.

At least it appears their mobile dGPUs are about to release:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-serpent-canyon-nuc-12-arc-alder-lake

If they are able to release these in mobile form, I don't understand why it is so difficult to release a dGPU for desktop.

[mtono]

Messaggio originale di Bezos:

I do wonder if Apple will be able to improve their GPU's further. Having more competition from Apple in the gaming scene would be interesting to see.

hi,
i dont think, that apple can make prices for as fast as gfx boards. apple's concept is more beautiful computing like a piece of furniture and the others can make industrial machines for a cheaper price. so apple has private costumers mostly and industry has more windows pcs running, i think.
my2ct

[Mr White]

Intel should concentrate more on integrated GPU there still way behind AMD. Despite year after year promising they will improve

[Crawl]

Messaggio originale di Dragon Fire:

Intel should concentrate more on integrated GPU there still way behind AMD. Despite year after year promising they will improve

I think a lot of Intel's igpu performance problems are driver related as well. They just haven't been focused on the gaming space.

[AmaiAmai]

I think Arc is DoA from Intel's complete lax approach to drivers.

Seriously, the iGPU space Intel supposedly dominates is full of extremely buggy performance on games and sometimes applications like Adobe and Corel -- to an inexcusable degree.

To see Intel abandon iGPU drivers recently, even for hardware that is still fairly recent and on the market speaks volumes about their future plans for GPU life, and that doesn't appeal to me when AMD has better long-term support and open drivers.

I am capable of writing my own drivers for the device by myself, but seriously? I can't spend money on a product, write drivers for it to work, and basically do a company's bidding at my expense. I'm not a fanboy, and Intel is a multibillion dollar company with engineers they pay to do that job so I expect them to do it.

One good thing they can expand on is whether or not those cards natively support virtualization, and can be used in a VM with their full performance without wasting a week rewriting a terrible closed source driver (Nvidia) to get it to work properly.

If that were the case, I'd only be interested if I got the graphics for FREE or they were present in the laptop range where iGPUs generally are the only option (200-400) segment. Otherwise, that's a hard no for me.

[A&A]

Messaggio originale di ZeekAncient:

Speaking of ARM, I was one who excited when I heard that Nvidia was in the process of acquiring ARM. I figured it wouldn't be long before we saw Nvidia develop and release consumer CPUs.

Well, more competition = better products
But have you know that Nvidia have Tegra CPUs for mobile devices?

[ZeekAncient]

https://www.techspot.com/news/95525-intel-arc-graphics-cards-dead-arrival.html

[mtono]

Messaggio originale di ZeekAncient:

https://www.techspot.com/news/95525-intel-arc-graphics-cards-dead-arrival.html

intel has one plus: they have cpu technique, too. they can sell well balanced systems because of that. i am a collector of pieces of hardware. i will buy an intel arc graphics board as soon as possible and i really dont like the "antihype" thing that intel suffers from made by people that know it all. do you know what i mean? i myself want to hold an intel gfx in my hands. call me sick. i am just a fan of hardware.