News Intel GPUs - Intel launches A580

[Glo.]

That level of performance increase is very odd.

I wonder if intel driver optimizations are taking shortcuts?


AMD and Nvidia squeak 15% out of a driver optimization for a specific game on a good day. Intel is more then doubling performance on their optimizations for specific games. Seems just to good to be true.

Its just how much of performance is laying down in those GPUs.

The hardware capabilities are there. Its just a matter of software to extract it from.

 

[mikk]

Question #3: I’ve read reviews that say Intel’s driver is not ready yet. What’s the status?

We appreciate the feedback we are getting in early reviews of our Arc software stack. And it has been bumpy. We have received frank feedback from press during recent reviews, and we have taken it to heart. For example, we filed 43 issues with our engineering team from a review of the A380 by Gamers Nexus. We had corrected 4 of those issues by the end of July. Since then, we corrected 21 UI issues in our driver release on August 19th, and it also includes Day0 support for Saints Row, Madden NFL 23, fixes for Stray and Horizon Zero Dawn crashes, Marvel’s Spider-Man performance fix, and fixes on SmoothSync corruptions. We are taking similar approaches with reports from other press reviews.


We are continuing to learn what it will take for us to be successful. Some of the issues were related to our installer and how it downloaded unique components after initial installation. This allows us to have a smaller initial download to get users started quicker. But unexpected failures are causing that process to be unreliable, and later this year we will be moving to a combined package that is downloaded and installed all at once. No more installer issues.

Engineering Arc - 8/19/2022

by Lisa Pearce, Vice President and General Manager for the Visual Compute Group I want to continue to share more information and respond to questions we are receiving from customers, the community, and press. We’ve got 4 hot topics to hit in today’s blog. Question #1: Why does Intel performance...

community.intel.com

They need more feedback, much more. Bring it into the market and they will get tons of feedback about issues they are not aware of.

 

[psolord]

Well at least they are vocal and seem to care.

The first step to fix a problem is to acknowledge it.

 

[LightningZ71]

They are essentially confessing to using early adopters and reviewers as their quality control department. A reviewer shouldn't be able to find 43 individual line items worthy of engineering notices. A half dozen on a new release, yeah, that's fine, but 43?!?!

This is the same Intel as past gpu/iGPU efforts so far. I still have zero confidence that they won't just pull another Kady Lake-g and walk away from support while there are still lots of products in the retail pipeline.

 

[igor_kavinski]

They are using .Net Core for the control panel. I hope it's not as clunky as AMD's experiment with using dotnet to make the Catalyst Control Center.

 

[igor_kavinski]

A half dozen on a new release, yeah, that's fine, but 43?!?!

Lisa's a 25 year veteran. Some possibilities that might explain the driver issues:

1) She's taking a hands off approach and letting her engineers do what they think is best. That's not a bad management style but she has to eat her own dog food: put an ARC A380 in her PC and install the drivers and check if everything's working the way it should be. If she doesn't do that, guess who gets blamed? Her! She can point fingers at her team but she's the one in charge and she needs to quit sleeping at the wheel.

2) She doesn't know what she's doing and has some subordinate "advisor". Is her advisor trying to get her fired so he/she can take her job?

3) She's not a gamer and has never installed AMD/Nvidia drivers so she's not that aware of the level of polish that must go into creating final shipping drivers. The decision to decouple the driver and the control center just to save a few hundred megabytes worth of download waits? She should know that gamers wait for GIGABYTES of games to download!

4) She knows what to do but Raja is meddling and overriding her decisions. Maybe he doesn't like her and trying to get her fired?

Any other possibilities?

 

[mikk]

They are essentially confessing to using early adopters and reviewers as their quality control department. A reviewer shouldn't be able to find 43 individual line items worthy of engineering notices. A half dozen on a new release, yeah, that's fine, but 43?!?!

This is the same Intel as past gpu/iGPU efforts so far. I still have zero confidence that they won't just pull another Kady Lake-g and walk away from support while there are still lots of products in the retail pipeline.

It's not the same as past iGPU efforts. Intel Arc control is something we haven't seen before from Intel, not even close. The overclocking stuff and much more is a dGPU effort. Without the dGPU effort they wouldn't even have designed such a new feature rich control panel. Same for some of the new features like SmoothSync. Kabylake-G was dead from the beginning because of the GPU which wasn't Intels, it had no future. Any driver effort they are doing on Arc will or should benefit future Xe based GPUs from Intel regardless of iGPU or dGPU, this is a very big difference to Kabylake-G. I think Intel has validation issues, maybe their validation is too small I don't know. But let's be realistic they need feedback from outside and not only from customers but also from reviewer and developers, they really have to release the cards finally. In the past they didn't even care about feedback from reviewers, now they are honest and say it's welcome. The difference to the iGPU only years are obvious.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Any other possibilities?

You were alluding to it, but I will make it quicker. Occam's Razor - Lisa is long entrenched management which is most of the problem. Intel seems to have become a lot like the old IBM, the more I read about the company.

And Ryan and Tom's tour I will now dub the disinformation tour. Seems they made up the rebar, DX9, and game optimization focus answers. Tom/MLID had some scathing comments about it all. If he is even half right, it's bad stuff. He showed the clip of their misleading answer about how soon the cards would launch, that was a month ago. They both look like snake oil salesmen at this point.

 

[DeathReborn]

It's not the same as past iGPU efforts. Intel Arc control is something we haven't seen before from Intel, not even close. The overclocking stuff and much more is a dGPU effort. Without the dGPU effort they wouldn't even have designed such a new feature rich control panel. Same for some of the new features like SmoothSync. Kabylake-G was dead from the beginning because of the GPU which wasn't Intels, it had no future. Any driver effort they are doing on Arc will or should benefit future Xe based GPUs from Intel regardless of iGPU or dGPU, this is a very big difference to Kabylake-G. I think Intel has validation issues, maybe their validation is too small I don't know. But let's be realistic they need feedback from outside and not only from customers but also from reviewer and developers, they really have to release the cards finally. In the past they didn't even care about feedback from reviewers, now they are honest and say it's welcome. The difference to the iGPU only years are obvious.

Overclocking the i740 was virtually impossible, no software at the time could figure out how to do so. When they moved it to a IGP product there was no need to. Intel has no history of overclocking dGPU's because they give up before it even starts. If Intel is still making dGPU's for consumers in 5 years I will be shocked.

 

[moinmoin]

It's not the same as past iGPU efforts. Intel Arc control is something we haven't seen before from Intel, not even close. The overclocking stuff and much more is a dGPU effort. Without the dGPU effort they wouldn't even have designed such a new feature rich control panel. Same for some of the new features like SmoothSync. Kabylake-G was dead from the beginning because of the GPU which wasn't Intels, it had no future. Any driver effort they are doing on Arc will or should benefit future Xe based GPUs from Intel regardless of iGPU or dGPU, this is a very big difference to Kabylake-G. I think Intel has validation issues, maybe their validation is too small I don't know. But let's be realistic they need feedback from outside and not only from customers but also from reviewer and developers, they really have to release the cards finally. In the past they didn't even care about feedback from reviewers, now they are honest and say it's welcome. The difference to the iGPU only years are obvious.

Maybe somebody should have told them early on that it's better to focus on the basics first instead on optional fluff. And the basics could have been built with the iGPU efforts already, but weren't. So aside of fluff for which they already did plenty PR it's actually the same as past iGPU efforts, only improving after the fact...

 

[IntelUser2000]

Maybe somebody should have told them early on that it's better to focus on the basics first instead on optional fluff. And the basics could have been built with the iGPU efforts already, but weren't. So aside of fluff for which they already did plenty PR it's actually the same as past iGPU efforts, only improving after the fact...

Of course it is. And as bad as it may sound that's how things tend to work. You think you got it all together but the market tells you otherwise, and you get way more info about that the closer you get to launch. Theory and planning pales in comparison to the real world.

I knew Cannonlake had to launch even in it's state and once they did it became much better and 10nm era begun. It's a definition of a breakthrough.

They have different culture and organization that allowed them to succeed in other areas. Also iGPUs are very different. Still the base is what makes them the most potent third contender. By Battlemage timeframe people will think otherwise. The NPCs that roam the world will think Intel took it easy but we'll know the truth and it took them lots of work and money in addition to heavy criticism to get there.

The pace of improvements tells me they are serious about it.

Its just how much of performance is laying down in those GPUs.

The hardware capabilities are there. Its just a matter of software to extract it from.

The scale of the improvement tells me they fixed a bug particular to that game. Their architecture is very different and things like hand tuning is very much alive. APIs will never fully automate the process.

The release notes even say there was a performance issue the driver fixed. They also fixed the issue with F1.

Let's say by end of the year they address 99% of the issue today and is roughly on par with AMD in driver quality. Even if it takes them until mid next year, they would have the potential to displace a company that was entrenched for 25 years. How often does that happen? I am not saying that's what will happen just that it's an extremely difficult thing to do.

 

[Aapje]

Let's say by end of the year they address 99% of the issue today and is roughly on par with AMD in driver quality.

This seems absurdly optimistic. I'd be surprised if they get to that level at the end of next year.

 

[Leeea]

This seems absurdly optimistic. I'd be surprised if they get to that level at the end of next year.

Odds are intel will never get there.

For one thing, we know DX9 is broke and intel is refusing the fix it. ( blaming Microsoft for the issue, but at the end of the day it is the Intel Product that is not running the game )

 

[mikk]

Odds are intel will never get there.

For one thing, we know DX9 is broke and intel is refusing the fix it. ( blaming Microsoft for the issue, but at the end of the day it is the Intel Product that is not running the game )

Back in the Gen6 - Gen9 iGPU days the same people claimed Intel will never bring dGPUs into the market or even be able to compete with iGPUs from AMD. Never say never. DX9 wasn't broken, they just dropped it. There is no guarantee RDNA3 won't use dx9on12.

 

[Heartbreaker]

For one thing, we know DX9 is broke and intel is refusing the fix it. ( blaming Microsoft for the issue, but at the end of the day it is the Intel Product that is not running the game )

Not doing a DX9 driver at this point, makes reasonable sense.

You won't be limited to dx9on12. There is also DXVK.

AMD/NVidia DX9 driver aren't all that great. I have seen reports of some people getting better results using DXVK on Windows, than the official DX9 drivers.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I have seen reports of some people getting better results using DXVK on Windows, than the official DX9 drivers.

Interesting.

 

[AdamK47]

This whole mess has me wondering if any of the Intel leadership are actual real PC gamers.

 

[VirtualLarry]

This whole mess has me wondering if any of the Intel leadership are actual real PC gamers.

Doubtful.

 

[Aapje]

This whole mess has me wondering if any of the Intel leadership are actual real PC gamers.

Once in university I entered a competition and ended up presenting something in front of some executives, who were very interested in what the young people would come up with.

Intel could try to actually talk to gamers...

 

[igor_kavinski]

Raja Koduri is a gamer. He plays Mortal Kombat, Soul Caliber etc. Used to play Prince of Persia (the very first DOS based one). I guess he's satisfied that HIS games are running fine on ARC

 

[Aapje]

Raja Koduri is a gamer. He plays Mortal Kombat, Soul Caliber etc.

Perhaps he was a gamer, but I don't see how he would have time now.

Note that both of the games you name were released in 1995, so my guess is that's when he last gamed.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Note that both of the games you name were released in 1995, so my guess is that's when he last gamed.

Yeah. DOSBox is all he needs for his gaming needs. ARC just serves to heat his room

He may play the latest versions of these games on a console though.

 

[moinmoin]

Interesting.

But not surprising as that's in active open source development and (thanks to Steam Deck and more handheld PCs) has a growing community around it. I doubt dx9on12 will ever reach a similar state. Is it even being actively developed by Microsoft, or is it just a blunt translation layer without further optimizations planned, akin to a software renderer?

This whole mess has me wondering if any of the Intel leadership are actual real PC gamers.

I'd say the state of the iGPU drivers answers that question succinctly.

 

[Heartbreaker]

But not surprising as that's in active open source development and (thanks to Steam Deck and more handheld PCs) has a growing community around it. I doubt dx9on12 will ever reach a similar state. Is it even being actively developed by Microsoft, or is it just a blunt translation layer without further optimizations planned, akin to a software renderer?

Still good to have multiple solutions, because one solution could glitch where the other works and vice versa.

 

[moinmoin]

Still good to have multiple solutions, because one solution could glitch where the other works and vice versa.

Can the user pick an choose under Windows?