Info Intel ARC Alchemist owners thread. Now 75 games tested, retested, and counting. Includes productivity experiences. Feel free to add your results.

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Aapje

Golden Member
Mar 21, 2022
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As to ARC: Performance in the latest games is mostly bad. Battle mage needs to get the bang for buck back on track.
Most likely they switched development to the Battlemage drivers.

I think that the Arc buyers will be screwed as the design of Battlemage is probably significantly different to fix the Arc drivers, so improvements for Battlemage will probably often not carry over to Arc. And with the limited sales, there probably will be too few angry people for them bothering to do much for Arc once Battlemage is out.
 

DAPUNISHER

Super Moderator CPU Forum Mod and Elite Member
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Aug 22, 2001
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Most likely they switched development to the Battlemage drivers.

I think that the Arc buyers will be screwed as the design of Battlemage is probably significantly different to fix the Arc drivers, so improvements for Battlemage will probably often not carry over to Arc. And with the limited sales, there probably will be too few angry people for them bothering to do much for Arc once Battlemage is out.
Indeed. ARC is going from fine blueberry wine to vinegar :(

doh.jpg
 
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gdansk

Diamond Member
Feb 8, 2011
4,076
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I have an unlikely request for a ARC graphics card owner:
Medieval Total War Gold Edition (c. 2003)
I have not been able to even open this game on my Intel Xe laptop while it works (ish) on a RDNA3 laptop. I was wondering if ARC has the same problem.
 

DAPUNISHER

Super Moderator CPU Forum Mod and Elite Member
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My A750 has been relegated to the Mrs. daily driver. I don't own the game either. Have you already tried the 32bit DXVK files and DXwrapper with no joy?

Hopefully someone here can test for you.
 

511

Golden Member
Jul 12, 2024
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Most likely they switched development to the Battlemage drivers.

I think that the Arc buyers will be screwed as the design of Battlemage is probably significantly different to fix the Arc drivers, so improvements for Battlemage will probably often not carry over to Arc. And with the limited sales, there probably will be too few angry people for them bothering to do much for Arc once Battlemage is out.
Nope cause Intel meteor lake amd arrow lake are Arc Xe1 Based as well
 

Aapje

Golden Member
Mar 21, 2022
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Nope cause Intel meteor lake amd arrow lake are Arc Xe1 Based as well

Those are way slower, and the exact issue that Intel had, is that they thought that their drivers that worked well for low performance APUs, would work well for discrete graphics cards. But it turns out that they didn't.
 

DAPUNISHER

Super Moderator CPU Forum Mod and Elite Member
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Another unfortunately poor showing for ARC

arc.jpg

Going to need XeSS, which should get you over 60FPS so you can use frame generation.
 
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DigDog

Lifer
Jun 3, 2011
14,296
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do you guys figure that Battlemage is going to be reasonably priced, compared to an equivalent AMD / Nv card? (i.e. is there any point to me waiting another 6 months before i can play STALKER 2, or should i shell out for a A770 on cyber monday?)
 
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DAPUNISHER

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do you guys figure that Battlemage is going to be reasonably priced, compared to an equivalent AMD / Nv card? (i.e. is there any point to me waiting another 6 months before i can play STALKER 2, or should i shell out for a A770 on cyber monday?)
The B580 and B750 may launch in a week or 3 according to the latest rumors. It'd be savvy to get them out before Xmas and before the other IHVs next generations launch. Day one reviews should help you decide which way to go. That time should give devs a chance to patch some of the major bugs in Stalker 2.
 

DAPUNISHER

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yep, i heard of those. But let's be serious, nobody was expecting a STALKER (!!) game to launch without bugs.
I saw a blurb in my feed where the reviewer said they encountered the same bug from 14yrs? ago, and it they found it comforting. 🤣
 
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DZero

Golden Member
Jun 20, 2024
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STALKER??? I hear the "Cheeki breekies" in my head with that game.

Meanwhile, how Intel is faring in this year? Qualcomm and Apple is pretty beating them CPU wise...
 

DAPUNISHER

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Might as well post this here. The lossless scaling app is on sale for $5 on Steam.

 
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BurnItDwn

Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
26,280
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Might as well post this here. The lossless scaling app is on sale for $5 on Steam.

My wife runs stuff using the Lossless scaling app. That way the cheap used 1080 TI I got for her can pretty much play everything with her screen set to the 4k native resolution, She uses it for watching movies or shows than for for gaming, and i saw no reason to make her run everything at 1080p when its a 4k tv. It works good.
 

DavidC1

Golden Member
Dec 29, 2023
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I think that the Arc buyers will be screwed as the design of Battlemage is probably significantly different to fix the Arc drivers, so improvements for Battlemage will probably often not carry over to Arc. And with the limited sales, there probably will be too few angry people for them bothering to do much for Arc once Battlemage is out.
Since Battlemage seems to be just as, if not worse on the 1080p driver bottleneck front, there is a possibility for a driver that could be used to boost performance for both generations, the bottleneck of which will get rapidly worse as they get faster GPUs out, such as B770 and Celestial.

Looks like it's about ~10% with 9800X3D in 1080p and with lower end CPUs it'll be greater like 20-30% with even greater improvement in 1% lows.

They were supposed to get a DX11 driver out that fixes the bottleneck in a general way not by whitelisting, but we haven't got an update from them yet. So this could be fixed too.
UE5 is shaping up to be the best way to get gamers to upgrade. ARC is pretty bad at this game
This part was supposed to be noticeably better too. It doesn't seem like Battlemage is significantly better relatively in this regard.
 

DAPUNISHER

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Aug 22, 2001
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The speculation about the driver team moving on from Alchemist certainly has evidence piling up in support. A770 is not doing well in Nvidia showcase games or all but one of the Sony ports tested. Ratchet and Clank was the only brightspot really. I guess it should not be surprising that both Intel and AMD struggle with games optimized for Nvidia. The RT wins over Radeon are phyricc victories.

When I was actively gaming on the A750 there were constant improvements in older games, but DXVK was almost always superior. New games played well bang for buck wise. I dubbed it fine blueberry wine. Judging by this update the bottle is "corked" now. :( It's a cautionary tale perhaps. In that there is no knowing if optimizations for B series will continue when series C approaches release.

Spiderman still has the asset streaming issue with a 7500F, a CPU that makes sense to pair with an inexpensive GPU. Especially given ice shops AliExpress. XeSS was broken in one game. Bummer.

 

511

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Jul 12, 2024
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The speculation about the driver team moving on from Alchemist certainly has evidence piling up in support. A770 is not doing well in Nvidia showcase games or all but one of the Sony ports tested. Ratchet and Clank was the only brightspot really. I guess it should not be surprising that both Intel and AMD struggle with games optimized for Nvidia. The RT wins over Radeon are phyricc victories.

When I was actively gaming on the A750 there were constant improvements in older games, but DXVK was almost always superior. New games played well bang for buck wise. I dubbed it fine blueberry wine. Judging by this update the bottle is "corked" now. :( It's a cautionary tale perhaps. In that there is no knowing if optimizations for B series will continue when series C approaches release.

Spiderman still has the asset streaming issue with a 7500F, a CPU that makes sense to pair with an inexpensive GPU. Especially given ice shops AliExpress. XeSS was broken in one game. Bummer.

I doubt it cause the arc architecture for A770 and Arrow Lake and Meteor Lake iGPU are the same for the raster
 
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DAPUNISHER

Super Moderator CPU Forum Mod and Elite Member
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Aug 22, 2001
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I doubt it cause the arc architecture for A770 and Arrow Lake and Meteor Lake iGPU are the same for the raster
That's a strong point. Then we are back to it being a hardware issue?