My Problems With INTEL's ARC

I did not expect Intel's first generation of graphics cards to be so fast at their best the performance of the a750 and 770 cards is enough to satisfy the needs of most Gamers at the popular 1080P and 1440p resolutions sure they're no GeForce 4090 but most people won't be getting a 4090 will they so I felt the tier of Intel's products to be sensibly chosen however even if their performance and price matched against AMD and Nvidia Rivals I still could not see Intel as being equals due to the many exotic problems their drivers suffered from which were so bad they were just not feasible as gaming options on release day I would have hoped for more of a discounted price than we ultimately got and while every update improves the situation somewhat I still wouldn't want to recommend the cards to others but it may be getting to the point where I'd consider using one myself all these driver issues that Intel has faced shouldn't come as a shock to you because making a new graphics card is hard and even with Intel being a massive company that's actually serious about making a graphics card they will still have to work long and hard to catch up with the Head Start that AMD and Nvidia have in this market but that still doesn't mean that I want to use them in a broken State I can forgive poor performance but when it comes to Exotic inescapable software-based problems like it not being able to display an image on your monitor or game breaking artifacting and buggy visuals or stutter fests and broken overlays these sorts of issues are not fun and can make using your PC a thoroughly unpleasant experience we don't know how many computer things you take for granted until they don't work anymore hence why I'm quite happy to let Intel iron these things out before I give their products consideration so this video will discuss the barriers that Intel needs to break down before I consider their graphics cards to be on par with amds and nvidias so the big ongoing thing is the drivers and I have been thoroughly impressed by how frequent the Intel has updated them and how they've been focusing on remedying the worst of the identified problems if they keep this up then by the time their next generation of cards comes out then they should be in pretty good shape I know what you're thinking who am I to assess the state of their drivers if I don't even have one of their cards myself well the fact that there's still patching problems on popular games and benchmarks is telling if there are still issues with commonly played games then it's only going to get worse once you go off the beaten path and begin trying older and less popular games and applications instead so I'm being fair on them by giving them a bit longer to patch things up before I subject myself to their cards because I just know that if I try them too soon I could end up resenting them and it's not fun waiting around for every new update in the hope that all my particular problems will be resolved so yeah I tend to like experimental new stuff but something about software issues that you can't work around really irks me but it seems like Intel are getting there the other condition that Intel needs to meet before I'm happy with them is to show that they're serious about committing to the future if you buy an Nvidia or AMD card then you can be fairly confident that they'll still be supported in three to five years time because there's nothing to indicate otherwise is there Nvidia are up going strong and always have done while amd's struggling but always have done and they've pulled through worse than this before so they'll probably keep on going but with Intel they have no trapped record in the graphics card Market to base things off apart from failed projects so there is the risk that they've made pull out again before you've had your money's worth out of your graphics card but how can Intel promise the future to us now right now Intel is communicating their intent via their regular new driver updates don't get me wrong if they didn't do this then their art cards would be dead in the water right now nobody would trust a company that ships broken products and doesn't bother fixing them but broken products that are regularly improved and fixed that looks a lot better doesn't it it's still not as good as if they were released in a fully working state but it's the next best thing and understandable with a brand new graphics card and sure Intel's cards have weaknesses but they also have strengths like excellent support for av1 encoding if Intel's cards are only ever comparable or worse than their Rivals then it makes them A Hard Sell but if you key strengths like this one can make taking the plunge a lot less daunting and I like that they've made their own ex set their own upscaling solution they could have just relied on amd's fsr2 but they went out of their way to become less dependent on an alternative by creating their own and I believe it works better on Intel cards than it does on others anyway which is another nice selling point it probably gives Arc users a warm fuzzy feeling when they load a game up and see that Intel has bothered supporting it personally but you know the best way of knowing if a company will do something it's if it benefits them to do that thing and investing in Arc makes sense for Intel because it's awesome to grab a slice of the graphics card Market at a time when people deem 300 to be a low end and when AI is emerging as being another reason for people to need more computing power and it seems to me like Intel has already had to do a load of the graphics work to get the integrated graphics on their processors working in the first place if I was in Intel's position I'd certainly wanted to try and scale that up to Dedicated Solutions as well and for the benefits of one to trickle across to the other I'm sure improved drivers and upscaling solutions like ex ESS will be a godsend in their apus as well this combined approach has suddenly paid off for AMD who have found great success in combining their CPU and GPU efforts to drive things like the PlayStation the Xbox and steam deck the computer-based apus aren't bad either so if I was Intel I'd definitely want a powerful in-house solution that I was in control of instead of having to rely on other companies for any system which requires more power than integrated Graphics can provide I've seen a few people online suggesting that Arc has been a failure but if you ask me it's gone about as well as it could have done better than I expected it to in fact that they've been able to create and to sell a product that sits within the 200 to 300 price point first time in such a large Market is a very good sign indeed and Intel knows it will take time money effort and manpower to pull something like this off I really don't see them canceling the project so soon after the first release when it already shows so much promise and yet even for me the launch of their next generation of graphics cards will be the moment that I will seriously consider getting one of their cards not only because I hope that by then their drivers will be fairly decent but because hopefully by then their card's price to Performance offering will be something worth getting excited about and I think that's already the thing that's made me hesitant about wanting to cover these existing cards it's sort of like the same GeForce 1080 TI performance that we've already seen from amd's Radeon 7 the 5700 series The 6600 series The GeForce 2070 series a 3060 series and come on let's move things on a bit shall we if the arc a750 and 770 were 150 and 200 then that would be worth getting excited about but this Market has become so stagnant that we've all become so jaded that even this seems like wishful thinking but if Intel's next generation of graphics cards which I presume will be like the battle mage b750 and 850 and stuff like that can actually shift the price performance cover long a bit then it will be something worth getting excited about I'm hoping that a third player in the graphics card Market will bring about some price water I'm not too confident about that but I like to try and be positive so yeah I suppose this video has been a bit of a soul-searching exercise for me to try and establish why I don't get too excited about covering the a750 and 770 cards despite them probably being the most exciting graphics cards to appear in the last few years and I really think it boils down to how it doesn't really deliver exciting price to Performance especially given the state of its day one drivers I thought Intel's first cards would have shaken up the market somewhat but they haven't at all and that's a problem and let's be honest here another big reason I haven't covered them is because I'd have to buy a product that I'd only really use to make a video with and that costs me money let's talk sponsorships which is when a company pays someone money to make content about their product just so you know I haven't been asked by Intel or anything like that I just saw digital Foundry had been paid to make a video about the arc a770 and it got me thinking about the value of such content like if you're paid to say nice things about a product or not to say bad things then the content will be of limited value yes you can raise awareness that a product works in certain games situations but that probably isn't what people want to know about said product however if you're paid for your time to investigate something you otherwise wouldn't have done then I can see the value to that both for you and for your viewers watching for instance last year I went and bought a Radeon 6500 XT because I was personally very curious to see how it would perform despite its Hardware limitations problem is you're not interested my videos on that card aren't very popular and it simply isn't profitable for me to dedicate so much time to testing that card when the audience for that kind of content is so small it's just that for that small audience the videos are very handy because it provides an insight into a product that they may well be considering for themselves but that's the issue I have with covering these Arc cards right now I'd have to buy one then I'd have to spend several weeks of my life testing it making notes capturing footage and so on even if it does earn me money it still won't compensate for the initial investment and time required when I could just be spamming out low effort Source 2 rumor videos instead so anyway that's how I see paid content it can have a reason and use if given the right circumstances but obviously nothing's better than content that's being made simply for the sake of testing said product I've been really impressed with how Linus Tech tips has been handling Arc they clearly had some privileged access from Intel early on but since then they provided all sorts of content on the graphics cards talking about how they are to use over the course of weeks and months they've live streamed it running gameplay from across numerous different games and have been vocal about the issues they've encountered with them as well as the areas in which Arc has excelled and this kind of content is invaluable for showing people what these products are like it certainly helped me to understand the current state that they're in so yeah I think it's in everyone's best interests that Intel's Arc becomes as good as possible and I can't wait for proper three-way competition to make its way to the graphics card Market again at this point it'll be the first time in decades

Channel: 2kliksphilip

Views: 23,097

Keywords: reacting, worst, videos, linustechtips, reaction, best videos, 2kliksphilip, intel arc, arc review, intel review, review intel, a750, a770

Id: FSV2e1q97jw

Length: 9min 11sec (551 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 07 2023