ONE YEAR LATER: Intel Arc GPU Drivers, Bugs, & Huge Improvements

so our concern Remains the Same as originally which is if intel corporate thinks this is a waste of money Which Intel shareholders it please it's not it's going in the right direction please commit the resources required to make this work it's getting there Intel please don't screw this up it's gotten a lot better it's been a little over a year now since Intel Arc launched the gpus that are supposed to bring an entrance to the discret market for Intel graphics and the launch was bad and to Intel's credit it acknowledged that it posted a blog post after our review a year ago where it promised to fix its issues it even directly named Us in that so they weren't trying to hide it and that's great to see a lot has changed in the time since we're revisiting our punch list of driver issues to see how much our recommendation might have changed with the improvements to Arc and that was one of our main points in the review was that Intel needed to be upfront and direct about its restrictions its limitations with different API support game support and the fact that it would be an ongoing improvement process and they were very direct with that which is great that's exactly what Intel needed to do so there was a point in time in the midst of the GP related shortages for the pandemic and Mining and everything else where all Intel had to do was show up and ship something for less than $1,000 intel was primed to go after arc's official August 2021 announcement delays follow as did several launches that seemed designed to satisfy legal requirements technically Ark launched on the next to last day of quarter 1 2022 which is the quarter they promised to launch but it was only in laptops and the first discret gaming card the A380 launched at the end of quarter 2 but only in China one of the ones we got was through a pre-built shipped from AliExpress the a750 and a770 the real cards everyone was waiting for showed up in quarter 4 of 2022 to by that point intel was allegedly offering CPUs in Li of gpus as prizes for the XE hpg scavenger hunt that's not to mention the half-baked XE dg1 that preceded all of this way back in November of 2020 all of that is to say that Intel Arc had a lot more time in the oven to bake than was originally expected and it needed that time to bake but now it's been an additional year they've had time to roll out fixes and it's time to revisit it and see how it looks today and thank you to our viewer in the comments who recommended an Intel Arc one year later piece because here you go before that this video is brought to you by the Arctic liquid freezer 2 Series Arctic ships its liquid freezer 2 in both AR argb and non-rgb variants and we've found their coolers to be among the best performers for our CPU test benches we've bought several now and have them on our GPU and CPU test benches for daily use Arctic also has its p12 Max and p8 Max fans that we've been using in some of our ITX case reviews you can find links to all of these in the description below we won't re-explain all the many challenges that any GPU manufacturer would face trying to get into this Market but the important ones are software and drivers making the hardware is difficult enough Intel did pretty well there they made Hardware that when the software and the drivers and the games when it all meshes together and works the hardware actually runs pretty competitively and with recent price drops for things like the Intel Arc a750 CS where we've seen them as low as $190 now $10 over the new a580 although that seemed to be a limited price but when it's that low the a750 genuinely is a very strong competitor in the games where it runs well but all of our looks at Intel Arc and every time we've recommended something like an a750 in a particular title all of them have been caveat with the note that enthusiasts should be the ones buying it people who have the troubleshooting experience and people who are patient to deal with the card and ideally have a backup GPU from Nvidia or AMD so that's been the line that we've been drawing in our recommendations and Intel needs to fix that part of fixing that is improving a lot of the bugs that it's had and usability issues some of this will be ongoing though now in spite of diving in at the deep end Intel still piled on the work and made it as difficult as possible for themselves to really establish a core strong feature set and the way they did that was by seemingly desperately trying to replicate or mirror onet to one every feature that Nvidia and AMD could offer so they could complete their bullet list on the side of a box uh examples of this include first party recording and streaming functions they also have R tracing on as one of these features that's far more important these days than say a shadow play option just tell your users to use OBS or something add that in later it doesn't need to be there right away uh overlays performance controls and tuning integer scaling to name a random handful and the shotgun approach here is what hamstr on Intel early on because it was trying to keep up with too many spinning plates and it was going to have to drop some of them in favor of hopefully stabilizing its core feature set as a result of that A380 coverage Intel immediately began posting updates and it noted in an August 2022 blog that it had quote filed 43 issues with our engineering team from a review of the A380 by Gamers Nexus and quote corrected four of those issues by the end of July we checked back in to report on that post and then we checked again at the beginning of this year to check for performance improvements and that is the biggest upside to this story Intel has been focusing on the important parts now that it's past that launch it had a pretty hard start a bit of a wakeup call on reality check but directx9 dxx 11 in general have gotten big sweeping updates where you see anything from single digit percentages in the most recent example of I think it was Halo Master Chief Collection getting a 750 uplift because it was functionally broken before so they have delivered in a lot of the improvements there but it's not wholesale fixed we have a list of things that we've encountered we're going to look at fixed unfixed and partially fixed issues and then some design choices as well for our onee in review revisit of Intel Arc starting with unfixed problems we discussed the visual artifacting bugs with smooth sync back when the A380 launched but our recap of what the features supposed to do was cut for time because it didn't work so it didn't matter here's a summary smooth sync and speed sync are both tearing mitigation modes buried in the frame delivery submenu of our control as for other options application Choice respects in-game settings vsync delivers frames in sync with the display refresh rate and smart sync quote automatically disables vsync when the application's render rate exceeds the display's refresh rate and disables vsync when the render rate Falls below the displays refresh rate other than application Choice each of these driver level settings requ requires vsync to be turned off in game in order to take effect all these options are designed to mitigate tearing which happens when the GPU delivers frames out of sync with the display primarily on displays without variable refresh capability so free sync gsync adaptive sync and vrr vsync delays the frame delivery to eliminate tears speed sync which is the Intel thing allows the game engine to run ahead uncapped is this a technical term no cap and then delivers the newest hold frame to eliminate tears but it may lead to perceived stuttering so enter smooth sink also an Intel thing which allows tearing but it diers tears over exactly 32 scan lines Intel says this is handled by a hardare block inside the display engine and it had no measurable performance impact in our testing the problem we noted back in August of 2022 was that enabling smooth syn caused serious artifacting in several of the games we benched specifically non-direct X12 games so Total War 3i kingdoms Tom clany Rainbow Six Siege Grand Theft Auto 5 things like that in's blog post after our review and later that month stated quote we corrected 21 UI issues in our driver release on August 19th and it also includes fixes on smooth sync Corruptions and the no longer publicly hosted patch notes for that driver lists enabling smooth SN May exhibit display corruption in certain game titles under the fixed issues header it's very clearly labeled as fixed those aren't Lies per se but we tried smooth syn again a couple months later and the results made us suspicious we confirmed those suspicions for this piece smooth sync is simply turned off for Rainbow Six Siege and GTA 5 and presumably any other games that had reported issues it still works as expected in games that we originally saw it working in like strange Brigade so at least one person will be happy although they need to have an arc gpus might be close closer to zero but as far as we know Intel never copped to the fact that it's fix was to just turn smooth syn off in a lot of these games as for Speed Sync It's just gone there's no mention of it in the arc control menu so rest in peace speed sync it's definitely one way to fix a bug you can't have bugs if you don't have features next topic is duplicate issues so when Ark launched Not only would the arc control app be installed as part of the driver install process but the Intel Graphics Command Center would also automatically download afterwards it's not true anymore which maybe is an improvement but Command Center does offer different variable refresh settings than our control does when a compatible display is connected and it's still software that exists just now you pull it down through the Microsoft store Intel Arc control contains these settings all in separate submenus there's variable refresh rate variable refresh rate mode and tearing mitigation modes Intel's Graphics Command Center which is separate software contains this setting for adaptive sync and on top of that Windows contains the setting for variable refresh rate as well none of these settings are linked to each other except that vrr can't be enabled in AR control unless it's enabled in graphics Command Center first but not Vice vers it's just confusing and there needs to be at least some explanation here but Intel did remove the smart vsync setting from Command Center so someone's listening there that's a good thing the next one is Intel's driver and support assistant tool which is forcibly installed alongside our control you can install just the bar driver or you can install the driver and Arc control and the inti driver support assistant but you can't install just the driver and AR control it's especially annoying for us since we'd like to avoid installing Auto driver update bloatware on vital testbenches even though it's part of the GPU driver install DSA isn't handled by Wagner soft's d cleanup like art control and Graphics Command Center R because it's a random piece of non GPU related software DSA can be manually uninstalled immediately without consequences so it's not critical next up is hdcp because of how smooth sync works we needed to use an external capture system to record it in action and it was a massive pain hdcp blocked us from recording anything AMD at least includes an option in its own control panel to explicitly disable htcp and although Nvidia does we've successfully used the capture system with Nvidia cards in the past in order to capture Intel we had to use the old school janky HDMI splitter workaround htcp is already annoying and this is just a poor implementation of next notifications at launch Intel blasted a ton of annoying notifications from system tray that would pop up with notes of varying useful and uselessness Intel may have cut down on the number of notifications from AR control but the ones that show up before they are turned off are still still pretty annoying the toast isn't delivered through Windows notifications it rather pops up from the app itself and the notifications can't be interacted with or dismissed until they time out on their own that's the annoying part you have to sit there and stare at them until they go away also the DPI scaling is screwed up on old 1280 x 1024 monitors but we're probably among the few people who still find them useful for some things so no big loss there time to get into the problems that were at least partially fixed by Intel this is a mix of fixed and unfixed where it's sort of Schrodinger's driver bug the bug is both present and not present as lot as you don't install the drivers so the first one is Monitor compatibility this was one of the more serious issues but it was on a restricted set of monitors we had it happen on one newer Monitor and one high-end 4k monitor but it was from 2014 and that issue was that the Intel cards just wouldn't spit the display out uh to either of these two monitors there was a subtle fix in the A7 70 review where we found that intel was able to get output to those two specific displays under the conditions of being in Windows but only after the driver was installed and loaded which meant no output in BIOS or in safe mode so that one's at least partially fixed and if you're using an Intel Arc card and you have a black screen issue probably it's a specific monitor Plus card compatibility limitation again we only saw it on two displays but we only really tested it on a couple displays anyway so we're not sure how wide sweeping that is now for fans in our Arc a770 review we saw the fans on our GPU spun constantly never turning off even at idle we've occasionally seen the fans spin down with updated drivers and firmware but the heat generated and the power drawn by the a770 Le at idol remains high enough to keep the fans spinning the majority of the time so we're not counting this as a full fix now we'll talk about some design choices as a general rule games don't run as well on arc when using dx9 or dx11 that's in comparison to other vendors on dx9 and 11 and and to Arc cards using dx12 or Vulcan as tap said it's just going to be a labor of love for forever uh making dx11 titles get better and better and better and dx9 as well directx12 and Vulcan are both thin apis that shift a lot of the responsibility for memory management and optimization to applications like game engines so it gets as they say closer to the metal this strips down a lot of the dx11 and dx9 driver side requirements where a lot almost all of that core responsibility was on Nvidia AMD and to the extent that it was present at the time Intel to build the driver stack so dx11 and dx9 create more work for GPU vendors which is a problem for a restricted team that's coming in late like Intel and Nvidia and AMD had a big head start here with Nvidia in particular having a very strong dx11 uh driver setup so Intel is stuck trying to catch up in this one even as those a pis continue to get phased out this has contributed to ark's subpar record for day one game support especially for DirectX 11 games if intel were to slow down or halt software support for Arc game compatibility would likely rapidly go downhill also Intel says quote for dx9 Intel uses a dx9 on 12 mapping layer that means that Arc dx9 performance depends on the ongoing development and optimization of this layer we think Intel made the right choice by focusing its driver efforts on the newer apis ones that are easier for it to support and ones that are becoming more widespread and at this point are fairly ubiquit is uh it does however mean that Ark isn't a reliable platform for playing older games or Games built on older apis that happen to be new games and certainly these are still coming out so unfortunately given the mid to budget range price of the Aeries cards and the mid-range performance of those cards this could be a make or break point for people who do want to play older games and value them or are just playing games as they come out that are still dx11 balers gate is an easy and relevant recent example where dx11 was significantly worse than Vulcan the good side there is that it shipped with two apis and one of them is the closer to the metal one Vulcan so you're able to work around that issue and whenever you have two options as long as the game's not bugged out you should be using dx12 or Vulcan for Intel Arc this next one wasn't an issue but a design Choice Arc needs rebar Works without rebar enabled but performance can be massively worse depending on the application we talked about that in the review this behavior is inherent to the memory controller used by Intel Intel's memory controller doesn't perform well with small transactions it prefers large transactions enabled by resizable bar again that's a design choice and we agree with Intel's decision to shift Focus to newer stuff but it does put a limitation on the type of user here once again where if you're trying to drop this into a at this point very old platform because rebar supports been brought back pretty far uh you really shouldn't be mixing Intel with platforms old enough that resizable bar is not an option because you might have big performance hits in some games on the positive side now there have been a ton of issues that have been fully resolved so one in particular that we're cautiously optimistic about is the Windows update repeatedly overriding driver installs issue formerly if you installed Intel drivers with clean install selected especially after running ddu Windows update would immediately downgrade the driver to what whatever ancient LTS version it had on hand Intel's official recommendation back then was to quote make sure not to enable the execute a clean installation checkbox which is completely unacceptable as a fix we can't promise this problem has gone permanently but we've been trying it on our test benches and we haven't encountered it so that's a good thing Windows updates left us alone the next section is just our big list of complaints that have been simply resolved nothing really to talk about other than the fact that they've been fixed which is great we covered until severely bugged Rainbow Six Siege Behavior previously the game was wildly inconsistent on Arc where frame times would sporadically double or in other words the frame rate would sporadically have Intel resolved this issue when we covered it back in February of this year the net result was a significant Improvement to the frame times and the average frame rate in this chart from our original coverage for the fix you can see that the a770 and a750 went from the bottom of the chart toward the middle it's a big uplift as we mentioned before CS2 replaced it CS Go's performance was really buggy and that was also resolved the frame times were some of the worst consistency we'd seen in a long time and Intel fixed that early this year we tested it back then and since that time the game has been replaced but at least the groundwork for the fix remains in the drivers one of the big ones was AR control's existence only as an overlay this was incredibly frustrating AR control would act as if it were a steam overlay but on the desktop making it impossible to interact with the rest of the desktop this overlay Behavior persisted even when it was the only application open rather than being a window you'd have to alt Tab out of it to access other applications including notepad this was a big ux oversight Intel has fixed this behavior and greatly improved the usability as a result so we're happy to see this Improvement another one was a fix of the arc control center where a series of actions that included opening the arc overlay and a lowrise application like 1080p on a higher res display like 4K and then exiting then opening the application overlay on the native resolution desk toop would break our control center it was kind of a specific set of steps to get there but the end result was breaking the application this specific problem has been fixed we previously complained heavily about non- dismissible notifications some of those behaviors still exist but one critical one has been fixed which is when the display would wake not the system but the screen itself the control center would pop up multiple notifications every single time the display woke up sometimes it would stack halfway up the screen this this was particularly annoying because they couldn't be dismissed Intel has at least resolved this for our test setup another one was rebar rebar was previously incorrectly listed as not supported an arc control even when it was enabled and working and confirmed working this has been resolved we haven't seen this one again next one was another big oversight driver installation weirdly required an internet connection this was a big problem because Windows could take over and hijack the install and install an older driver version prior to the user completing their own install this has been resolved this one was a small issue the driver installer would previously minimize itself during installation and could not be restored that's fixed now previously rerunning the driver package installer would only give the option to repair the current install without options to change what features were being installed or reinstalled and inel has improved this Behavior as well another fix previously using the reset button on the overclock screen to reset OC values would throw an unexpected error it was as if no one had ever used that page before shipping we showed it in our last piece Intel has fixed this following our review the next is a series of fixes for performance slider changes voltage control and fan control previously the performance slider would throw errors when it was adjusted that's fixed also the voltage control was oddly in decimal Mill volts we noticed so microvolts instead of Mill volts the changes either didn't actually do anything because they were too small or it just presented improperly but either way it's fixed and finally fan control did not work uh or exists sometimes that appears to be mostly resolved there's still some weird fan Behavior though at idol one of the big problems was where Intel art control would just inevitably break we didn't have an explicit reason for this it just would with 100% certainty stop functioning at some point and this particular failure was really bad because it wasn't able to be reinstalled on that system at all after it broke we actually nuked one of our test op operating systems over it because it was that bad it was a critical fault with the software that as far as we've seen has been fixed so that's great now additionally but unrelated AR control would sometimes open multiple instances at one time again for reasons we don't know but it also sometimes failed to install seemingly for no reason and we've not seen either of these issues pop up again since Intel's improvements where they seemingly got rid of them finally Intel DSA sometimes would have an update available for art control but trying to download it permanently broke DSA this appears to be fixed overall the software has improved dramatically the hardware has always been good when it works it's been relatively competitive with that $200 pricing we sometimes see of the a750 that is the strongest selling point for Intel Arc the largest remaining concern is if intel keeps up with this project because as we've seen here uh yes they can fix performance for games on a one by one basis things like Starfield which just didn't work out of the gate and continued to be be massively problematic Even in our recent a580 review inel told us shortly after that review that they had found and resolved the issue that was causing the frame time pacing problems with the a580 but the point is that these are things that exist and require manual attention and manual Discovery and that's challenging when there are as many games as there are so our concern Remains the Same as originally which is if intel corporate thinks this is a waste of money Which Intel shareholders it please it's not not it's going in the right direction please commit the resources required to make this work it's getting there but if at some point someone in the money management group or whatever for Intel someone high up at Intel kills all of this then uh people who own art cards now will have a a good chance of being effectively doomed when new games come out especially if they're on dx11 and a lot of the games coming out still still are we're also concerned about Intel's recent layoffs which may be affecting the driver team and that team needs a lot of manpower to keep up with these updates but the good news is what we can see right now is a continual Improvement where it it's been forthcoming with everyone it said yes we know we have problems in fact here are the problems and that's awesome they can't do the thing Nvidia does or Andy kind does where you just try to ignore the issues and slowly roll out fixes uh or explain them somehow Intel has to be up front because it's the smaller one trying to get into it and everyone knows they're going to have problems and that's fine this is really hard to do but it's about not mism marketing early on and potentially misleading people into thinking it's a a more sort of lowlevel low uh experien consumer Friendly Card which it's not it's kind of still an Enthusiast thing first and foremost but they've been really good about that so that's promising either way there's still multiple games like Starfield uh City skylines 2 was crashing on our Arc card GTA 5 has had on andof issues where just breaks at various times that these games they they don't always work and that's the main challenge but overall Intel has in fact resolved many issues some of the remaining ones are disruptive for casual users or users without a second GPU or users who are plain brand new games right when they launch but at least the drivers are moving in the right direction and for the more experienced among you or for those of you who don't need to play Starfield on day one when it comes out or other games like that then it's still worth considering something like an A50 cuz the pricing has been very competitive and it's an interesting GPU to play around with if you just want something different but you need to not be relying on that GPU for everything you do so that's still the challenge but that's our revisit one year in review lot of improvements overall and still some of the core issues remain we'll see where it goes from here thanks for watching subscribe for more go to store. Gamers nexus.net to support our in-depth reporting or go to Gamers nexus.net if you want to check out the article version of this in about a week or so and of course patreon.com Gamers Nexus to help fund the AdFree written article reviews experience thanks for watching we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 200,147

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, intel arc gpus, intel arc worth it, intel arc 2023, intel arc bugs, intel arc issues, intel arc a750, intel arc a770, intel arc a380, intel arc drivers

Id: aXU9wee0tec

Length: 26min 15sec (1575 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 27 2023