Question Intel ARC A770 Performance and idle power draw after Feb. 2023 driver update

[Kocicak]

I got A770 16GB card (BTW for less than what I sold my RX580 8GB for a while ago), I wanted to test how it runs after the 4091 driver update.

It still consumes 40W being idle. Is there some setting that might be causing this? Since I most of the time do nothing graphic intensive on my PC, I find this idle power draw unacceptable!

Playback of Youtube 4K video adds just 5W on top of that.

So far I experienced no problems, I ran 3D mark test multiple times, no crashes etc.

Some results:

 

[mikk]

Check out with HWinfo if you are running in L1 entry, here is a screenshot how to find it: https://blog-imgs-157.fc2.com/r/i/g..._driver_idle_power_pcie_max_power_save_02.png

Maybe Gigabye doesn't support ASPM L1 with the current bios. They might release it in the future, some users got an experimental BIOS from Gigabyte.

 

[TESKATLIPOKA]

Somebody from Intel is surely reading this and they will fix it swiftly.

I have 13 days left to return the card to the dealer.

So why did you give them only a week to fix It?

What price? I payed 9600 CZK for it. That includes 21% VAT. That is approx. 360 USD without VAT.

Isn't that a pretty good price?

 

[Kocicak]

Cause I am impatient.

When I enable Native ASPM in the bios, it works, the card idles at 8W.

4K Youtube playback is still 45W though, what is the typical value of other cards?

HWinfo shows this info about the card, I have not been able to find it elsewhere. It seems it is connected with one lane, which does not seem to be right.

 

[Kocicak]

Good, so the 8W goodness ended, because the computer crashed when I was dragging a window across the screen. It was slightly artifacting when rebooting on top of the screen, blue crash screen was garbled as well.

Maybe there are other reasons why they run the card at 40W.

 

[igor_kavinski]

What now?

High Power Consumption when Intel® Arc™ Graphics Card is...

Configuration required to enable an idle low power consumption profile for Intel Arc Graphics Desktop cards.

www.intel.com

I hope this works for you.

 

[Kocicak]

I hope this works for you.

Thank you, I already figured it myself, it worked for a while and then it crashed. It is out already. It seems that the new driver is intended for integrated graphics as well, I hope it will work.

 

[Lenster45]

Has anyone with an ASROCK board figured out which ASPM settings to enable? I've had a message into ASROCK for a week now but no response

 

[DAPUNISHER]

BTW I shortly owned 6700 12G card, but the video playback had horrible jumps in it, I could not figure out, what setting to change to get rid of it. I do not want to repeat that with another RX card.

I have zero playback issues with any of my RDNA2 cards. Be it streaming services like Disney+, Amazon Prime and channels,HBO/MAX, youtube. Or even playing back Bluray, DVD, or transcoded content through VLC.

That forces me to conclude you have other problems. As I am referencing 4 different systems. Every system is all AMD hardware though.

 

[Shmee]

My 7900XTX seems to work pretty well, granted the software / drivers aren't perfect yet. Not sure a card like this is in his budget though.

 

[Stuka87]

Cause I am impatient.

When I enable Native ASPM in the bios, it works, the card idles at 8W.

4K Youtube playback is still 45W though, what is the typical value of other cards?

HWinfo shows this info about the card, I have not been able to find it elsewhere. It seems it is connected with one lane, which does not seem to be right.

Here is some data from TPU from the Arc 770 review. Now this was reviewed back in October, and from what I can tell, they have not retested the Arc with newer drivers, which are said to lower power.

 

[Kocicak]

Here is some data from TPU from the Arc 770 review. Now this was reviewed back in October, and from what I can tell, they have not retested the Arc with newer drivers, which are said to lower power.

Well, I had 45 W in video playback, and in this review they claim 50. So is this 5W that improvement?

 

[mikk]

Try this video in Chrome at 8K resolution:

Hardware acceleration should be enabled.

What GPU power draw reports GPUz? On my A380 it says 22W.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I posted this vid in the ARC thread as well. But I will have this start at power consumption. With the A750 it used at minimum, 35W idle with the latest drivers.

 

[mikk]

They test out of the box and we do know that Arc uses high idle power usage, nothing new there. It can be fixed with ASPM L1 but it doesn't work well with higher refresh rate displays or multi display setups. Also some mainboard vendors like Gigabyte have issues which they have to sort out with bios updates. With my A380 and Asus board on a simple 1080p 60HZ I'm fine with the results. 50 watts without ASPM L1 entire PC and 35 watt with ASPM L1 entire PC (GPU board power roughly 7 watts)

 

[DAPUNISHER]

They test out of the box and we do know that Arc uses high idle power usage, nothing new there. It can be fixed with ASPM L1 but it doesn't work well with higher refresh rate displays or multi display setups. Also some mainboard vendors like Gigabyte have issues which they have to sort out with bios updates. With my A380 and Asus board on a simple 1080p 60HZ I'm fine with the results. 50 watts without ASPM L1 entire PC and 35 watt with ASPM L1 entire PC (GPU board power roughly 7 watts)

That ain't helping the gaming power usage either. How has undervolting and power limiting done with ARC? Is it seeing the kind of acceptably small performance drops AMD and Nvidia have, in exchange for better power efficiency?

 

[mikk]

Gaming efficiency is worse but this is mainly because the GPU/driver is underperforming. In 1080p to 1440p A750 goes from a -3% deficit to a 9% win. Just from the specs A770 should be closer to 3060 Ti or 3070 level of performance.

However the gaming power load is not as severe since we don't game 24 hours per day. Idle usage is the bigger problem imho and I hope they can have a better out of the box idle mode with the Alchemist refresh. It's reportedly a new chip, maybe they have fixed something.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Gaming efficiency is worse but this is mainly because the GPU/driver is underperforming. In 1080p to 1440p A750 goes from a -3% deficit to a 9% win. Just from the specs A770 should be closer to 3060 Ti or 3070 level of performance.

However the gaming power load is not as severe since we don't game 24 hours per day. Idle usage is the bigger problem imho and I hope they can have a better out of the box idle mode with the Alchemist refresh. It's reportedly a new chip, maybe they have fixed something.

It is evident it loses the value proposition then. Even the PC idling 2hrs gaming 1hr numbers in that chart, make it a bad value v. 6600 as time goes by. There is no way a single digit performance difference advantage at 1440p is ever going to justify the added power cost.

It is a much better proposition here in the U.S.

 

[mikk]

It is evident it loses the value proposition then. Even the PC idling 2hrs gaming 1hr numbers in that chart, make it a bad value v. 6600 as time goes by. There is no way a single digit performance difference advantage at 1440p is ever going to justify the added power cost.

It is a much better proposition here in the U.S.

Keep in mind they are testing out of the box idle usage. With ASPM L1 it can look quite a bit different.

 

[Stuka87]

Well, I had 45 W in video playback, and in this review they claim 50. So is this 5W that improvement?

Its more likely a difference in the video being played (resolution, codec, bitrate, etc).

Or the reported power via software is different than the actual power, as TPU does measure the actual power.

 

[sharga]

I have arc A750 from 3 days and i am terrified by the power consumption. I am also using the integrated video intel UHD 730. The monitor cable is plugged into the motherboard asrock b660. And the A750 is in the disabled state in the device manager. With UHD730 on youtube it draws between 3-10w. When i want play games just enable the ARC. It works through the cable inserted in the motherboard. I know this is ugly but it is way to be on energy saving site and have inner piece. Another things that i met around all the tries and bios settings, driver changes is that in one moment i remember that the ARC showed 8-15w in idle with the integrated also on. And i cannot reproduce it. Now i can go to 35w min on youtube and idle in browser.
The intel engineers need to check those two things: In the GPU-Z it shows pcie4x16 working on pcie4x16 all of the time. On the other cards not sure, but i remember that the card works on x2 and when you start the gpu test in the small window it runs at the maximum x8 , or x 16. The second thing is the min gpu clock. while using rx 6600 there where moments that the min clock was 3mhz. So why intel not give us opportunity to set min clock to be lower and fixed to start on 600. This may be not a problem because the UHD currently working on 700 mhz draw 3w while i am writing, but not sure what exactly causes discrete gpus to use so much power. And if someone wants to say that the monitor refresh rate need more power this is So Wrong. I am on 165hz 1440p utlrawide and UHD 730 made by intel using 3w now using the display port on the motherboard with intel i5-12400. So intel what is the problem? You can do it on the UHD , so you can do it on the discrete. Just go and do it to work.

 

[cherullo]

Resolution and frequency do affect power consumption. The difference is that the onboard graphics uses the CPU's memory. So when you increase the resolution/frequency, the grunt of the added power consumption goes to the CPU I/O, not the UHD graphics.
Meanwhile, when you use the discrete graphics card, it has to power up it's dedicated memory, which uses comparatively a lot of power. Once again, the higher res/freq will require the card to clock its memory higher, increasing power consumption.
So, is the UHD graphics is more efficient than a discrete graphics card? Yes. Does increasing res/freq increase the overall system power consumption? Always, if just a little bit.

 

[Hans Gruber]

Resolution and frequency do affect power consumption. The difference is that the onboard graphics uses the CPU's memory. So when you increase the resolution/frequency, the grunt of the added power consumption goes to the CPU I/O, not the UHD graphics.
Meanwhile, when you use the discrete graphics card, it has to power up it's dedicated memory, which uses comparatively a lot of power. Once again, the higher res/freq will require the card to clock its memory higher, increasing power consumption.
So, is the UHD graphics is more efficient than a discrete graphics card? Yes. Does increasing res/freq increase the overall system power consumption? Always, if just a little bit.

Memory is not the primary source of power. The GPU takes the most power in a GPU. Memory doesn't crank up, it's always on and it does not take much power to operate.