I Lived With An Intel Arc GPU For A Month...

now this pretty dusty gaming PC is featured  on the channel before it is my at-home gaming   system and for the last month it's had an Intel  Arc GPU in it and in today's video we're going   to discuss if it was actually like living with a  bipolar honey badger I.E not pleasant but before   not pleasant today's video sponsor today's video  is sponsored by be quiet and their new FX series   of products which is basically like their amazing  standard products but with RGB be quiet his RGB   defied their piroc 2 air coolers pure Loop 2 aios  and purebase 500 cases and considering that they   use non-proprietary RGB connectors that should  minimize the RGB struggle so check the link in   the video description if you want some be quiet  RGB thanks be quiet for sponsoring today's video [Music] thank you   oh almost dropped that holy crap and as you can  tell from the bits of dust sediment the graphics   God's been in here a while now before we get into  the trials and tribulations of Intel GPU ownership   just a little bit of context so that you get  where this video is coming from now this system   is used like 98 for gaming I do occasionally  edit thumbnails and stuff on it but it's it's   a recreational system and for the month I didn't  exhaustively test every use case imaginable I just   used the system for the things that I'd normally  use it just with an Intel a770 in it as opposed   to the RTX 3080 that's normally in it games wise  I primarily played Dota 2 which is about as easy   to run as from here to that door but over the last  month I did play some other games on it as well I   tried some escape from tarkov on it I also did  a bunch of stalker gamma which is a relatively   jankly modded version of an old video game and  as you can tell from this footage I filmed on a   70s camcorder I found in a dumpster trying to run  that on an arc GPU went about as terribly as you'd   expect but more on that later but other than that  I also played some Borderlands on it uh the forest   I played recently on it as well some Ship Breaker  and even some escape from tarkov which I may have   mentioned already and all of this gaming was  done on a 34-inch Ultra wide display so quite a   chunky resolution for this GPU to drive and after  spending a month paying you know various stuff on   it it was fine although I did have a couple of  problems which I think we should discuss now as of driver this obscene number I couldn't get  screen capturing to reliably work on the Intel   Arc GPU which is pretty annoying considering  that on both Nvidia and AMD gpus you just press   a button and it kind of happens now in terms  of the screen capture maybe I'm too stupid to   figure it out and that's the problem which is  likely but it's not like I'm trying to solve   M Theory with it so I feel like it shouldn't be  that complicated if it requires an IQ test for me   to get screen capture working with the software  it's not user friendly enough now under Studio   there's a whole capture Sub menu that lets you  set all of the parameters of the capturing you   know the resolution frame rate Kodak filtrate all  of that stuff but there's no place for you to set   a hotkey to start the capture which doesn't make  any sense like you can press the start button here   and then like 50 of the time it actually does a  screen capture but they can't expect me to alt   Tab out of the thing that I'm doing to press a  button in the software alt tab back in finish   the thing that I wanted to record and then alt  Tab out again to stop the thing that's just this   is just not acceptable now under app preferences  there is a hotkey submenu that only lets you set   a hotkey for highlights not for screen capturing  like it's such a weird problem they put all this   effort into a fancy capture facility and then  forgot to put in a way for you to turn it on   like at a point I started just using random  combinations of alt and other key hoping that   I just find a random combination that starts it  but I couldn't I even Googled it and couldn't   find a combination for it but this is an older  driver version and there has been an update in   the meantime so let's update the drivers and see  if maybe that fixes it now I decided to purge   the old drivers with napalm in case there was some  kind of latent setting issue before installing the   new fresh drivers but the new drivers didn't seem  to change anything in terms of the screen capture   nope that didn't fix it either which I know is  just going to lead to some super patronizing   comment down below about how obvious it is all  you need to do is this easy 29 step process which   usually doesn't end up working anyway but then  they'll keep going about how shocked they are   that somebody with a tech channel of my size  can't figure it out but that's the point it's   screen capture it shouldn't require figuring  out it should just work but anyway now that   my blood pressure is several PSI higher than  before let's get into the second problem I had [Music] now I want to preface all of this by  saying that struggling to run stalker gamma   is a bit of a niche complaint because it's a  very heavily modded version of a pretty janky   old game and sometimes its performance seems more  dependent on lunar's cycle than the hardware that   it's running on even with the 3080 in the system  the game's performance was sporadic but when I   dropped in the arc GPU it dropped from an average  of about 100 frames per second down to sometimes   in the mid-20s if it was raining which is really  not a great experience but then I remembered a   bunch of you mentioned to just use the dxvk fix  to get better gaming performance with older games   and Intel Arc gpus which is a fix that I think has  actually been natively added to the latest Intel   drivers but we'll try those out a little bit later  but anyway before those drivers I just couldn't   get the community made dxvk fix working for  stalker gamma because they're like source files   that you have to go and download off of GitHub and  then because stalker gamma is like 300 mods over   multiple install locations it's very difficult to  figure out where the dxvk source files need to go   to get them to work and then none of them worked  and it ended up with me just eventually breaking   the game install and having to go through the  very lengthy process to reinstall stalker gamma   and then I just rage quit on it and decided to  live with the terrible gaming performance but what   about those drivers I just mentioned let's give  those a try and see if they fix the performance   so I'm gonna do a quick Benchmark here in a very  specific bit that I saved so that we can update   the drivers and see if it's actually helped  with the performance now bear in mind this is   running a 1080p whereas I was gaming using 3440  by 1440p before as you can see resolution doesn't   really impact it much we're getting about  the same frame rate that I was getting with   the the ultra wide and you can see the GPU  isn't really doing anything so let's do some   benchmarking and then see if we can get more than  20 GPU utilization with the new driver [Music]   holy crap that is insane look at that frame rate  and that GPU utilization as well that is a huge   difference the performance Improvement was so big  in fact I thought it was a little bit fishy so I   went and reinstalled the older drivers but the  performance Improvement remained and I've even   gone as far as turning resize bar off to see if  has that made any difference but that this is   with the resize bar off and we're getting a much  better performance so despite the fact that I ddu   wiped the newer drivers off to install the old  ones on without being connected to the internet   it's still giving us the performance benefit  what makes it even weirder is earlier today I   got the worst performance I've ever gotten  from stalker gamma with the new drivers I   then just restarted the system and it fixed  it I briefly thought maybe it had something   to do with the system needing to restart for  Resolutions to apply but then when I set the   game to 4K it ran better than the initial  terrible performance so I have no idea what   to make of these results and quite frankly  I'm not even sure it's the arc gpu's fault   so I probably didn't need to include all  of this in this video but it was like the   only interesting thing that happened over my  time with The Arc gpus so I had to put it in now I know up until this point the whole  video has just been me complaining about   the arc GPU but those were two pretty minor Niche  complaints although the screen capture really is   very broken rarely if ever does it actually  capture any footage even if you manually   press the record button in the software like some  kind of animal and the reason I brought those up   over the course of the video was because honestly  most of the time I didn't even realize it was in   the system I just came home tried to play games  on it and games just kind of happened but let's   face it games working on a graphics card is very  much a minimum requirement so yeah I don't know   how much that information is worth to you um I  think Linus is also doing one of these month-long   periods with with this graphics card and I'm  sure he'll have a lot more varied tests and   stuff with his graphics card but for like pretty  basic gaming it meant the minimum requirement   of mostly working so yes thank you for watching  and until the next video bye-bye foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: Dawid Does Tech Stuff

Views: 265,683

Keywords: dawid, dawid does tech stuff, PC, gaming, intel, AMD, Corsair, Gaming, Game, Computer, Gaming PC, David Does Tech Stuff, DDTS, Tech, Stuff, David, Linus, Linus Tech Tips, Windows, Microsoft, CoolerMaster, DeepCool, bequiet!, Technology, cloud gaming, streaming, xbox, playstation, sony, Windows OS, GPU, Nvidia, gaming laptop, laptop, gaming computer monitor, monitor, Nvidia GeForce RTX

Id: ARPoz_GhVjY

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 21 2022