Been thinking about this for a while. Not too well atm, so I will just put this here. https://www.techspot.com/news/93087-leaked-benchmarks-show-intel-arc-alchemist-gpu-performing.html
Ironic that we're waiting for Intel to bring meaningful competition to the GPU market. They really need to improve their drivers though.
This can and should work in the user's favour. Been reading, and apparently a lot of people are saying that all Intel will care about for the first couple of years is adoption. Meaning they could sell the cards for no profit just to get people to buy them. Raja stated that they need adoption for support. IE, the more people that are using them and thus complaining to game devs the more game devs will support them etc. TBH a lot of it isn't drivers. A lot of it is purely down to support. Windows 11 supported the Alderlake CPUs. Windows 10 did not, and thus they were pretty terrible in Win 10 at first. That said this is Intel. Not some gofundme startup, so I am sure they will eventually get it right. But yeah, the more people who are on their GPU the better. The best part is Intel can afford to do what Raja really wanted to do (and started with Polaris at AMD). And that is sell cheap GPUs, get up the market share and etc. And he was on the right track too until Vega. Polaris was an exceptional tech IMO. OK so not world beating and didn't set any records but it was affordable for all and offered very good performance for all. The difference here is Intel have the money, and won't get all puckered up like AMD did.
Drivers are very important as someone who has tried to just use Intel iGPU for even the most basic of gaming, graphical abnormalities was the norm, but if there is a company out there that has the budget and resources to solve this it is probably Intel, they've just never really taken it seriously as their target was just pumping out office machines.
If the benchmarks are close to being accurate then that's a fair bit better than I was expecting right off the bat. I assume they will be selling direct and not have board partners - anyone read or heard different?
They've already shipped discretes to OEMs. So they will be using them from what I can tell. They reckon by the end of next year they'll be competing with Nvidia at the high end.
But was that drivers or simply a lack of support? Like usually if a GPU works perfectly for everything at desktop level and then has issues in games it's down to a lack of support. It's marketing Intel will be very good at. Not just to people buying the GPUs either, but game devs etc. They'll want their name and logo on about everything they can. Let's face it AMD have never been very good at that. They sometimes do, but it's very rare now and when they do it usually doesn't mean much. Intel though? have the budgets and will be targeting Nvidia, not AMD. AMD will probably fall by the wayside though tbh.
You're right that it's a lack of support, you're just looking at it from the wrong end of the stick : it's the job of the drivers to expose the hardware functions to the operating system so that the hardware functions can be used by software. Unlike an operating system, games are usually developed/built against known graphics APIs like DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL. It's up to the manufacturer to build the hardware to render the image, and it's the job of the drivers to expose those hardware functions to the operating system in a way that the graphics APIs can use. It isn't Microsoft's fault for not properly supporting an Intel GPU in DirectX, that's purely down to Intel's hardware and drivers. And Intel do have a track record of having rendering issues with their GPUs that is later fixed by driver updates. That's the point I was making originally: they are going to need to be far more responsive with their drivers than they have been in the past. The difference with Alder Lake and Windows 11/10 was that it was Microsoft's job to support the newer hardware standards in Windows. Windows 11's scheduler was designed to support CPUs with a mix of high- and low-performance cores, but that setup didn't exist in x86 CPUs when Windows 10's scheduler was designed. It wasn't Intel's fault that Microsoft took a while to patch Windows 10 for Alder Lake.
I think you are getting confused between drivers and support. Sort of dude. You mention that Microsoft did not put support in for AL on Win 10 etc. That's what I am talking about. Not drivers. A GPU can do all of the things it wants to. Without support those features are useless. For example ARC uses a form of DLSS. Hardware too apparently. However without support? it's useless. See also Physx, RT and everything else. The more cards Intel can sell and the bigger their userbase becomes the more seriously game devs will take Intel. Like as we know, there are a few titles that shine on AMD and not so much Nvidia, and vice versa. Intel have already spoken about a specific release of Death Stranding that will support their version of DLSS. A poor start? yeah probably. However, it's support they are after. Pretty sure they can make a decent driver, they have plenty of money.
I'm not talking about platform- or hardware-specific features like DLSS. I'm talking about Intel's graphics drivers being so bad that it cripples the basic operation of their GPUs. Because that's exactly what Intel have done in the past: totally ****ed the driver implementation, meaning 3D graphics API features don't work properly, leading to graphical artifacts, corruption, or poor performance. All I said is that Intel need to improve their drivers. We really don't need to argue and split hairs about what a driver is or isn't over half a dozen posts - most of us have been in this game a while and we know what drivers are and what they do. Support for new DLSS-like hardware means nothing if they **** up the drivers so badly that my games dont run properly because of corrupted graphics or rendering artefacts. Bad drivers with long update cycles have tripped up their GPU implementations in the past and bad drivers with long update cycles for Arc will kill the product. Of course they've got the money but Intel have form here.
Nice to see it's a reasonable size, at least. Most of the AIB 30 series and 60 series cards are just ****ing stupid big.
Yeah dual slot PCI height from the look of it. That said that's a prototype, and there's no clue yet as to whether Intel will even be selling cards. Chances are they'll head to companies like MSI to make into 4 slot tanks covered in stupid dragons. Edit. It doesn't look very different from the first shown prototype really. Just a different colour.
lol it bloody looks like it ! Having looked at them for a bit longer.. They are bloody long. Like, really long. Maybe they will shorten them down after they are done with the testing etc.
I'm interested, if for no other reason than hopefully lower prices. I still could use a Titan in my dually rig but market price will dictate what I get. Not going with less than 16 GB of vram as I have a 4k to push and use GPU rendering.
Just hearsay, but apparently the lower end cards could launch in April with the big one being held back until June. The reasoning? drivers. Apparently Raja stated that the drivers will make or break the launch. And he is right too. Things are nowhere near as desperate as they were, and people are slowly coming back down to earth. The market is still stuffed with over priced GPUs, but they are there if you are crazy enough. By June? I reckon something will have to be done to shift them tbh. OCUK have had a wealth of high end cards in stock for over a month now and they don't seem to be shifting. So if Intel really want their launch to go well they will need to be cheaper and work properly. Which is good I guess. I suppose if you held on for over two years there's no reason to rush into buy a double priced GPU now really.
Rumours are Intel are planning to dump 4 million discrete Arc GPUs in 2022 - should help prices I hope.
