I Can't Believe Intel is Selling This. - Intel Arc A370M

intel talks about quality a lot today they had the opportunity to walk that talk and this is what it looked like you know how we mock apple for going out on stage year after year after year this year's iphone is the best iphone that we have ever created it's ridiculous right obviously the new one is better and water is also wet right well after seeing this laptop i'm never gonna laugh at that again because thanks to intel's long-awaited arc a370 discrete gpu the new spectre x360 from hp is actually worse than the old rtx 3050 model and not just by a little bit now slow that i could overlook but buggy to the point where alex described some of its functions as barely working that's an embarrassment for any organization let alone one the size of intel now obviously these are very strong claims we're making here but don't worry unfortunately we've got receipts and we'll show them to you after this word from our sponsor busonic their elite xg321ug mini led monitor offers a 4k native resolution ips panel with a 144hz refresh rate and it comes with g-sync ultimate r4 and a quantum dot color layer so it's great for gamers or creators learn more at the link down below [Music] as the writer of this video i want to make it clear that i did not want to do this i've had lengthy calls with intel's engineers and worked really hard to show the strengths of intel's arc because i'm excited for it i was two years old the last time a new player entered the discrete gpu market and i was not sure it would ever happen again but i was i was hopeful i wanted this to be positive because amd and nvidia's duopoly has been in clear need of some disruption but unfortunately i can only review the hardware that's in front of me and it's a dumpster fire the naming scheme for art graphics goes arc 3 arc 5 and arc 7. so the a370m in our spectre x360 16 inch is kind of like the best of their i3 tier discrete gpus follow along so far good based on its positioning then intel had no expectations that it would be able to beat the rtx 3050 in gaming and they were correct about that in our testing the 3050 is a solid 30 percent faster in games despite being confined to the same chassis which wouldn't be a problem except that the arc equipped version is priced dollars higher oh and also in certain games even amd's integrated graphics are able to beat it with that said this performance level is kind of acceptable given that intel isn't really marketing this as a gaming card at 1080p on medium to low settings you can get a playable experience in most games and aside from occasional stuttering we barely saw any driver issues i mean intel wasn't expecting to beat nvidia gaming instead they want to leverage hardware encoders to beat them at content creation and it's to the point where 40 of the dye area is actually dedicated to non-traditional gaming things let's talk about that each intel arc gpu is made up of render slices and the main difference between a low end and a high-end gpu from intel is the number of render slices so the a370m has eight of them in each render slice you'll find four xe cores that are comprised of 16 xe vector engines these are what take care of rendering your games each being roughly equivalent to an execution unit in intel's igpus you'll also find 16 xe matrix engines which are dedicated to ai tasks like upscaling along with the 4xe course you get 4 ray tracing units along with some other stuff to you know make it actually work as a gpu all of this hardware dedicated to ai and matrix manipulation means then that in tasks like topaz video enhance ai video encoding and up sampling should work incredibly well and they do doubling the resolution of this floatplane exclusive video that we downloaded at 480p actually gave us a small win for intel we got .22 seconds per frame compared to nvidia's 0.24 or at least we did when the intel system worked most of the time nvidia won by simply not crashing in davinci resolve intel was able to leverage their av-1 encoders though to pull out a huge win against the 3050. though again this was by default because you can't do av1 encoding on the 3050 so we have no way to compare performance apples to apples not to mention that av1 encoding is only just beginning to find its usefulness in 2022. can't say the same about the wan hoodie though it's full of pockets and looks awesome lttstore.com in handbrake we well let's just say the numbers that we are about to show you took three days of back and forth with intel's engineers as of june 22nd 2022 here's what you arc owners out there all dozens of you will need to do to use handbrake first get the latest drivers not from windows update not from intel's driver utility but rather you will need to check a blog post to see if they've posted anything new then you'll need the latest nightly version of handbrake off of github the mainline version does not support intel arc yet at this point you'll have to be very very careful not to let windows update run because for whatever reason windows update will roll back the gpu drivers to an older version and if this happens it will completely break handbrake and you'll have to uninstall and remove everything from app data and start over once all that's complete you can set up your render nvidia's rtx 3050 was able to render out that 4k floatplane exclusive which by the way you can watch if you go over to flipplane.com in 10 minutes and 1 seconds then with the same settings our intel arc a370m didn't get past zero percent the video memory filled up and then nothing happened after a call with intel's engineers we realized that we had used a strange resolution and by using a different 1080p file the a370m actually completed that video in code in just two-thirds the time of the 30-50. wow so when intel is able to get their video encoders to consistently work arc might be a compelling value for video editors or maybe as an encoding coprocessor if you have a real gpu in your system the real disappointment here though isn't that a developer version of handbrake doesn't encode weird resolutions it's that windows will screw up your drivers remember that whole wintel alliance thing i mean if there's one thing i expect from intel it's that they're gonna work with microsoft to give you a seamless experience out of the box this was anything but anywho another way to leverage ark's ai capabilities is xe super sampling it's intel's take on nvidia dlss and it sounds great especially when you've got an underpowered gpu that needs all the upsampling that it can do the problem is that it needs to be enabled on a per game basis oh and also it isn't available yet so even though there's a bunch of apparently very impressive ai hardware on the a370m the software side is so incomplete that we weren't able to show you a single demo of that hardware i'm kind of reminded of nvidia's rtx launch except that that included a really fast gpu as well one area intel should excel though is power management in laptops there's a very small budget for power compared to desktops and making sure that that power is shared between the cpu and gpu properly can net you more performance and better battery life across the board to achieve this intel arc laptops have a control loop that monitors what the cpu and the gpu are doing and designs power targets every 100 milliseconds gpu activity is the main driver here and they'll give the gpu more power until it starts to be starved for utilization at which point they'll start allocating power budget back to the cpu now currently on gaming laptops setting your cpu and gpu power targets independently can net you 15 more fps if you absolutely nail that balance can also lose you 15 performance if you get it wrong so this is a welcome addition now nvidia does have a similar feature called dynamic boost 2.0 but on paper intel's approach will allow for much greater flexibility when it comes to power allocation except that in our testing the old spectre x360 remember with the nvidia gpu and also further hampered by an 11th gen cpu got better battery life in talking to both intel and hp this shouldn't have happened but in talking to intel more so many aspects of this review should have gone better and yet they didn't so it's clear that intel needs more time to get the bugs ironed out which raises the question why is this for sale well from our point of view intel is kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place here on the one hand they've got to get the software right if somebody buys an intel gpu today and has a terrible experience you can bet they're not going to be back for round two when battle mage drops even if it does end up being competitive with the best from a indian nvidia but then at the same time they have to get these out the door before nvidia's rtx 4000 series is announced the last thing they want to do is launch their top end arc a780 only to have it get embarrassed by an rtx 4050 ti they also can only find so many problems in their own lab so yeah i guess this is me saying the quiet part out loud the people that buy an arc gpu now are essentially beta testers for intel alex alone has now found multiple bugs that are now in the queue to be fixed it's just too bad that the timeline slipped so far if they had actually been able to release this in q1 like they had planned i'm sure loads of gamers would have been okay being an early adopter just to get their hands on literally anything to play games with now with gpu prices getting back to msrp or in some cases even below that early adopter tax it's gonna be a lot harder to swallow does this mean then that intel's arc gpus are a complete dud well no something everyone seems to have kind of forgotten at this point is how terrible ryzen was when it first launched there were firmware bugs we had multiple motherboards just spontaneously brick you needed super specific ram sticks to even to get it to post and even then that ram probably couldn't run at its rated speed despite verizon being so reliant on fast memory to perform well i mean heck there were usb bugs that have only been recently sorted out so i don't want to count out intel's arc just yet i mean if you think about it it's truly incredible that intel was able to ship a discrete gpu at all and i genuinely hope that in a year we're going to be praising it but today like alex said we can only review the hardware in front of us and i just can't fresh books when you're building a business you're passionate about it's easy to feel like there aren't enough hours in the day and if you're doing all the invoicing and accounting on your own you're probably spending time on work you don't love freshbooks is built for business owners like you it's the all-in-one accounting software that saves entrepreneurs and freelancers up to 11 hours per week that's 11 hours you could spend nailing a client pitch serving your customers or honing your craft from billing sending and following up on invoices to tracking and managing expenses to processing online payments freshbook automates and simplifies all the tough and annoying parts of running your own business it's also super easy to get up and running with award-winning freshbooks support team that always is available to answer your questions try freshbooks today for 30 days no credit card required go to freshbooks.com linus to get more time back and build a business you love well that was quite a train wreck if you want to watch something that worked out surprisingly well instead of surprisingly poorly maybe check out the video where we hot rod at a steam deck it's kinda awesome

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,446,398

Keywords: Intel, Arc, A370M, Graphics, HP Spectre x360, 16, laptop, mobile GPU, dGPU, Arc Graphics, Nvidia, RTX 3050

Id: mdFnY74dVNE

Length: 12min 42sec (762 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 02 2022