News Intel GPUs - Intel launches A580

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IntelUser2000

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Oct 14, 2003
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It doesn't matter. Their roles weren't the same at AMD. It might be true that Raja was at fault at AMD, but nothing conclusive that his skills were at fault, and Intel had issues with graphics before Raja.

The biggest issue with Intel is again not sticking to projects. They abandoned countless projects before. They need learn to stick to projects that are out of their bread-and-butter CPU line.

Quality of character readily shows mostly when they are under pressure. When you survive the low points of your life, then you'll come back springing.

Dropping prices, increased competition, threat of next gen competitor cards on the horizon, and internal issues have to be overcome. Nvidia didn't give up after NV30. AMD didn't give up after years of super low marketshare. If Alchemist has problems, they need to double down on fixing it and getting Battlemage and it's successors better.


Seems like it's having an issue switching to the dGPU properly and part of the performance issue. The review saying every game needed manual switch by the user gives us a clue.

The compatibility issue isn't bad as feared. The DG1 issues were really bad. And up until later last year, Iris Xe had many breaking issues with modern games.

Intel actually makes decent drivers when it comes to their Chipset and WiFi drivers. It's just that making a driver for a GPU is whole another level. It's astonishing the amount of work AMD/Nvidia puts to make every game work and at optimal speed. Imagine if you needed that kind of optimization for other parts like SSD, WiFi, and CPU! It would be an absolute nightmare!
 
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They have no choice anyway. The data center landscape absolutely demands for them to have a GPU and they need some place to offload the dies that fail their enterprise binning. They need to stay in the game with both CPU and GPU. Nvidia+ARM and AMD will make sure of that.
 

IntelUser2000

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They have no choice anyway. The data center landscape absolutely demands for them to have a GPU and they need some place to offload the dies that fail their enterprise binning.

Focusing on the data center will cause them to fail and is a cop out. Data Center focus is basically an excuse to exit the market. History tells us. Look at SGI. Look at IBM. They "wanted to focus on servers". Both are irrelevant nowadays. IBM had to sell majority of their server division and their volumes are tiny now. Look at RISC vendors. All gone.

Consumer is the real test. Servers get away with low volume manufacturing ultra high priced parts. Also the belief with enterprise customers is that they are old fashioned and go with "what they know". Consumer market has none of that. You have one company dominating one generation, but completely shifts in the next.

When you watch and read about history regarding 3DFX, the founders talk about how they wanted SGI-quality graphics but at consumer price. That's why if you can survive in a consumer market, server/workstation is basically an icing on the cake for you.

They do have a choice not to give up. It's way too early to judge even using Intel standards. Only their first generation.
 
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xpea

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Dropping prices, increased competition, threat of next gen competitor cards on the horizon, and internal issues have to be overcome. Nvidia didn't give up after NV30. AMD didn't give up after years of super low marketshare. If Alchemist has problems, they need to double down on fixing it and getting Battlemage and it's successors better.
Agree ! They must continue their journey in their highly competitive GPU market. They can't give up now

Intel actually makes decent drivers when it comes to their Chipset and WiFi drivers. It's just that making a driver for a GPU is whole another level. It's astonishing the amount of work AMD/Nvidia puts to make every game work and at optimal speed. Imagine if you needed that kind of optimization for other parts like SSD, WiFi, and CPU! It would be an absolute nightmare!
Agree again, except that their 2.5G network PHY has been plagued with huge bugs and they revised the silicon 3 times before it's really usable in pro environment. But that's the exception, not the norm
 

IntelUser2000

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Agree again, except that their 2.5G network PHY has been plagued with huge bugs and they revised the silicon 3 times before it's really usable in pro environment. But that's the exception, not the norm

Yes exceptions to the rule exist. But even in your example you talk about silicon bugs, not software. Certainly Intel isn't immune to software bugs. Actually nature of immensely complicated things mean you are guaranteed to have bugs.

They actually provide years of driver support for all their product line. That's taken for granted on the GPU space, but rest of computer parts they are not. Since you can't perfect it and only time can improve things, consistent support for many years is what improves drivers above and beyond competition.

We're only giving Intel snippets of chance now because they are within the ballpark. You wouldn't have bat an eye back in the HD Graphics days, nevermind GMA or heck Extreme Graphics if they said they wanted to make a bigger dGPU version of it! The drivers(and the hardware) were so horrible which is why people referred to Intel as "Graphics decelerators" and "Desktop display chips".

I swear, that Intel wanted to bring graphics down to the level of HD Audio. Few years ago they admitted it's way more than that. Now they are showing signs of completely changing that mentality.
 
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IntelUser2000

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This doesn't seem promising:


That system in the video uses the 1325 driver dated 30th of March. They have released the newer 1330 driver dated 8th of April.

They have fixed some of the Known Issues in the 1325 driver.
  • A Total War Saga: Troy may experience an application crash when the campaign is launched and "Ultra" quality game settings are selected.
  • Rust may intermittently experience an application crash when joining a new server.
  • Naraka: Bladepoint may experience texture corruption or flickering on some ground surfaces.

Forza Horizon 5 and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War may experience an application crash when launching the game.

Changed to

Forza Horizon 5* may experience texture corruption.

A fix driver in 8 days is very fast. If they keep this up it might be in decent shape.
 
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OK. I'm going to say something here so don't everybody jump on me. Is Intel happy with Raja coz he is outsourcing a lot of the GPU development / driver development work to India? Don't get me wrong. India has its fair share of brilliant minds. But if MOST of the work is being done there, you kinda lose on the diversity of intelligence. Different nationalities bring different strengths to the table so Intel should be employing an ethnically diverse workforce in this endeavor. Thing is, when you have all the same nationals working on some thing, they tend to agree on what's the best way to do things and it may not be the best for future innovation. Difference of opinion/thought/cultural background breeds innovation.
 

Glo.

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Apr 25, 2015
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OK. I'm going to say something here so don't everybody jump on me. Is Intel happy with Raja coz he is outsourcing a lot of the GPU development / driver development work to India? Don't get me wrong. India has its fair share of brilliant minds. But if MOST of the work is being done there, you kinda lose on the diversity of intelligence. Different nationalities bring different strengths to the table so Intel should be employing an ethnically diverse workforce in this endeavor. Thing is, when you have all the same nationals working on some thing, they tend to agree on what's the best way to do things and it may not be the best for future innovation. Difference of opinion/thought/cultural background breeds innovation.
Intel for years completely was not giving a two cents about the quality of their drivers.

When the plans changed and to develop the dGPUs - Intel had to act fast, and do, what typically is being done in decades, in just 5 years, because of complete neglegence of their drivers, and their quality. THE ONLY GOOD INTEL DRIVERS were for MacOS.

It has absolutely NOTHING to do with the work being outsourced to India. It has everything to do with the amount of work that has to be done in very short period of time.
 
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If Intel's driver teams are trying to do everything themselves (ingesting shader code from the game and spitting out replacement code more compatible with their GPU design) without being that much involved with the developers of the games, this is going to take a lot of time. Also, all that code replacement logic is not going to do any favors for CPU utilization.
 

NTMBK

Lifer
Nov 14, 2011
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If Intel's driver teams are trying to do everything themselves (ingesting shader code from the game and spitting out replacement code more compatible with their GPU design) without being that much involved with the developers of the games, this is going to take a lot of time. Also, all that code replacement logic is not going to do any favors for CPU utilization.

Code replacement should if anything be faster than "real" shader compilation. Hash the shader input, if the hash matches one of your optimized replacements then load that compiled binary from disk instead of performing compilation.

As far as I'm aware, both AMD and Nvidia also do this. It's just table stakes. Not every big game will optimize for your GPU- sometimes because they are working with your rival, and sometimes because it was released years before your GPU came out (hello, GTA V!). So you need in house developers who will reverse engineer the shaders, build optimized versions, and get that extra 10% performance in the most important games.
 

ultimatebob

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Forza Horizon 5 and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War may experience an application crash when launching the game.

Changed to

Forza Horizon 5* may experience texture corruption.

A fix driver in 8 days is very fast. If they keep this up it might be in decent shape.

It's still kinda sad that they launched a production driver that couldn't play Forza Horizon 5 correctly. That's not a small indie title, that's the IGN 2021 game of the year.
 
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mikk

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May 15, 2012
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That system in the video uses the 1325 driver dated 30th of March. They have released the newer 1330 driver dated 8th of April.

They have fixed some of the Known Issues in the 1325 driver.


No they are using build 1117 which is older of course, at least for the game benchmarks. Check out the overlay for the games.
 

IntelUser2000

Elite Member
Oct 14, 2003
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But if MOST of the work is being done there, you kinda lose on the diversity of intelligence. Different nationalities bring different strengths to the table so Intel should be employing an ethnically diverse workforce in this endeavor. Thing is, when you have all the same nationals working on some thing, they tend to agree on what's the best way to do things and it may not be the best for future innovation. Difference of opinion/thought/cultural background breeds innovation.

Be careful what you are wishing for here. Because many companies nowadays do this. But it's exactly the opposite of what they should be doing and will yield exactly the opposite of what they say they will do.

If you are saying they should hire for the sake of being ethnically diverse, that's the wrong way to go. Hiring has to be on merit. People skills, technical skills, and experience.

Also consider the following
-We hire based on the culture/skin color prefererence
-We hire to diversity the culture/skin color

Both are the same thing. You are discriminating. Somebody somewhere is not being hired because of the things they couldn't control and are superficial such as skin color and the country they are born in, and this will be despite their skills and experience. Only merit based hiring prevents that.

It's also a very divisive way of doing things. There are more important things than technology(surprise!) and work. Like having humans unified and getting along.
 
Feb 4, 2009
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Be careful what you are wishing for here. Because many companies nowadays do this. But it's exactly the opposite of what they should be doing and will yield exactly the opposite of what they say they will do.

If you are saying they should hire for the sake of being ethnically diverse, that's the wrong way to go. Hiring has to be on merit. People skills, technical skills, and experience.

Also consider the following
-We hire based on the culture/skin color prefererence
-We hire to diversity the culture/skin color

Both are the same thing. You are discriminating. Somebody somewhere is not being hired because of the things they couldn't control and are superficial such as skin color and the country they are born in, and this will be despite their skills and experience. Only merit based hiring prevents that.
Take it to P&N please
 
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If you are saying they should hire for the sake of being ethnically diverse, that's the wrong way to go. Hiring has to be on merit. People skills, technical skills, and experience.
I meant, don't just have a graphics driver team in India. Have one also in Finland, Germany, Netherlands, France etc and distribute the work between all those teams. Intel can afford it.
 

mikk

Diamond Member
May 15, 2012
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https://videocardz.com/driver/intel-arc-graphics-driver-30-0-101-1330

They seem to be moving at a quick pace with driver updates.


To me it's unclear why the DG2 driver is behind their regular iGPU driver. Not only the build number is much lower, the drivers files like the Vulkan or the oneVPL GPU driver are older. iGPU 1660 driver supports Vulkan 1.3 whereas DG2 is on Vulkan 1.2 with this newly released driver. However I know that their is a unified driver in the works, although I don't know about the release schedule.
 
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mikk

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May 15, 2012
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Intel dynamic tuning on/off comparison on the Samsung Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro and Arc A350M. It's much slower with Intel dynamic tuning installed/enabled.