i am hands-on with the Intel arc a770
this is their top spec gaming GPU and it
is very much an unreleased product that means that our test systems needed to be
disconnected from the internet data collection needed to be disabled and we
will definitely need to avoid revealing
any FPS counters so that we don't leak any sensitive performance numbers if i
care about keeping my promise
with that out of the way is Intel arc good should you be excited for when they
launch probably soon and should you listen to this segway to our sponsor
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Linus we're going to have that linked down below
i guess we can drop the pretense right behind me are two systems with identical
specs running the same game one would expect then for them to have the same
level of performance but clearly based purely on my eyes and not on the
clearly visible FPS counters this one is performing a lot better
so what's going on here the performance
disparity between these two systems is actually a big part of the reason that
Intel flew up here to show us the current state of things the one on your
right is running in directx 12 mode while the other one is in directx 11. so
rather than let me puzzle over why this would be our good friends ryan shrout
and tom peterson sat down with us to talk about the state of things the arc
team targeted new standards hard we have av-1 decode and encode support and our
lightweight driver is very good at speaking directly to the GPU hardware in
dx12 and vulkan making full use of its capabilities by the way the water in
this insulated bottle is both cold and refreshing lttstore.com
i made him say that the part i'm not going to make him say remember my
promise is that in directx 11 and 10 and 9 and etc
that's not really the case the thing is in those earlier versions
of directx to ease development there are loads of apis and driver baggage between
the game and the GPU now the performance can obviously still
be good but it takes a lot of tweaking
in the drivers and the game before it all works great which competitors like
NVIDIA and AMD have had literally decades to work on
so the short version of the bad news then is that in a lot of situations a game
won't be taking full advantage of an arc GPU and one of the worst examples of
this is here in shadow of the tomb raider where they drop
half of the performance going from dx12
to dx11 sorry excuse me my promise they
double going from dx11 to dx12
the point is however they want to spin it there's a lot of work to be done and
this optimization dance isn't one that can be done alone putting Intel in a
very challenging predicament the cold hard truth is that unfortunately for
team blue gamers do not exclusively play
directx 12 and vulcan games making arc
a bit of a tough sell until it's more optimized as for game developers well
why would they optimize for arc unless there's a large enough install base
see the chicken and egg problem here let's talk about the three-tier strategy
that Intel is planning to use then to beat this chicken and egg into a
delicious omelet at what we're calling tier one we're going to kill everyone in
price to performance and in these tier one titles that work really well on arc
we've already revealed some of them we're going to be best in class
performance outright just like that Floatplane has the best behind the
scenes and exclusive LTT content Floatplane.com
let's take a look then at some of those tier one games here's cyberpunk running
at quick preset high and
1440p oh wow okay that's a higher resolution than i was actually expecting
them to want to show off here oh no i don't have an FPS counter but i could
probably approximate it oh it's hard for me to tell for sure this has got to be
somewhere in the like 50 to 65 FPS range if i had
to guess cyberpunk's a little chunky and a
little teary and we're not using any kind of variable refresh rate right now
i'd say it's actually higher than that alex what do you think
uh i agree you agree
thanks i fortunately turned on my FPS counter well i'm just running a
benchmark but you know that's that's my job in f120 21 we're getting 180 FPS at
1440p highest settings which is impressive but
f1 2021 is a lighter title honestly i'm
more impressed by the fact that cyberpunk is running at all given what a hog this game is
now these are tier 1 games though they're not going to let us show you any tier 2
games yet so i have banished them from hosting
any more of the video but i am at least allowed to talk about
them the second tier is your less
optimized games but ones that are built on modern apis like directx 12 and
vulcan these are still going to perform pretty well for the reasons that we
discussed before tier 3 is where things get
a little dicey in direct x11 or earlier
arc doesn't always do very well and while we sorry i had something in my eye
there weren't able to run any tier 3 games ourselves on the a70 there have
been enough arc performance leaks out there to show you that yeah it can be a
little rough but Intel has no illusions
about this reality and they know that gamers expect to play a wide variety of
games that they can download at random out of the literally tens of
thousands of titles on steam fire it up and get acceptable bug-free
performance so being self-aware that there are going to
be some arc compromises and that there are some silicon surplus issues to work
around they have a bold plan and the
actual real buckets of money to turn that bold plan into a reality
you guys ready Intel is going to be basing their
pricing off of their internal testing of
third tier games
now they still won't tell us how much the a7d is going to cost but what we do
have is some data points that lead us to believe there are going to be some
pretty happy gamers first up is the general state of the
industry rumors abound that NVIDIA is
trying to cancel or at least delay manufacturing of a large chunk of their
upcoming 40 series gpus and it's pretty safe to say that given the recent mining
crash AMD is probably in a similar boat we guessed then that Intel probably also
overproduced arc silicon based on projections that they might have made
during the surge in demand for gaming pcs during the extended coveted
lockdowns over the last couple of years i think then that it's pretty safe to
say that aspirations for a large install base aside
they just plain have some inventory to move
next while the a70 especially this sexy
limited edition RGB card doesn't have an announced price or launch date they have
actually launched smart silicon this is the a380 and its performance
isn't particularly exciting but its price is
starting at 129 usd msrp with six gigs
of gdr6 memory and enough performance for 1080p gaming and light titles this
thing would have been an absolute godsend during the shortages and still
even without the shortages presents a value proposition that i wouldn't have
thought possible it's an entry-level GPU that you're not a complete idiot for
buying next up is the rapidly improving state
of arc on the software side the last time we looked at it we said and rightly
so sorry that Intel should be embarrassed
to launch a product in that state but in the three short weeks since then they
have fixed almost every issue we raised
and we have some background on what happened with a couple of them
first up was the problem with Windows update constantly rolling back our
drivers so what happened was there's all this
random hardware on your platform like all these chips all these cards right
and everything has an id that Windows uses to find the right driver for your
hardware every manufacturer has their own id it's
a four digit string fun fact Intel's is 8086 and then there's also an id for the
device itself so that's easy then right this driver
goes with this pair of ids
well on laptops there's kind of two manufacturers if you think about it and
therefore two sets of ids one for the silicon
vendor and one for the system maker now
there's a good reason for this historically oems like dell or hp needed
to have unique ids for their implementation of hardware like a GPU
say to specify any power constraints or display output capabilities
that means that when Windows update found two driver matches for our GPU one
from Intel directly and one specific one from hp
with both sets of ids it made sense that
it would prefer the hp specific one to avoid any unintended driver woes for the
user the long-term fix for this then is that
Intel's first party driver will need to take precedence and all oems will have
to get on board wow it must be nice to be Intel as for the battery life issues
that's a bit more complicated and has to do with power states
g2 is a high power idle state about 40
watts and that's where we were stuck now arc supports g8 which is more like a 10
watt idle power state but unfortunately they were in the final stages of
enabling that state in the driver and so
it wasn't there yet it will be along with other fixes in
august even with future driver updates though
there are some caveats that you potential art customers should be aware
of and i'd say the biggest one is your system's support for resizable bar
it's a feature that you enable in your bio so you can go check if it's there
and it's a bit complicated so i'm not going to go into the full details right
now but basically an arcgpus memory
controller benefits a lot from being able to execute fewer larger data
transfers rather than many many smaller ones when it's loading textures shaders
geometry or anything else that goes from the CPU to the GPU with that said arc
also has some competitive advantages that we touched on in our last video and
they haven't gone away when it works it is an encoding
powerhouse i mean av1 encoding in particular is the kind of thing that
you're unlikely to care about today but could actually be the difference between
this thing is a paperweight and i could still use this in my secondary
machine or my plex server five six seven
years from now it also has a lot of dedicated silicon for machine learning
driven features like ai upscaling though i wasn't able to test that either
what i can test is overclocking
performance tuning performance tuning now do note that they they screwed it up
and they don't have an apply thing so just it's it's a live slider it's a live
slider oh better better not you know
the performance boost it basically it changes your vf curve am i right yep
yeah okay so if you have better again
it's a little early but go for it you know okay yeah if you have better silicon than normal you might be able to
just okay boost it up a bit i just like fire my game back up and i might have
like boosted performance oh i guess we can actually see our clocks am i i'm am
i allowed to show those i'm not sure if that's working right but
oh yeah it seems to be locked the GPU temperature is locked at 69 degrees
celsius there's no way i believe that's no no i think that's true that's true
you think that's true yeah nice i don't think that CPU activity is
right at four percent though yeah that's good yeah that's probably a little wrong
i can't tell is this placebo or is this actually a little faster
i think it is i'm getting less tearing i think it might actually be faster i
think it's working okay you told me this wasn't going to work did it just crash it more and then
you'll crash it well there's no reason to have a temperature limit i don't care about any of that okay should i turn the
power limit up yeah why not i mean yeah should be
fine right yeah what could go wrong yeah what could go wrong so none of that
changed yeah also i think i'm getting more tearing
which doesn't necessarily actually mean that performance is worse tearing is a
function of your frame rate versus your refresh rate and it's a little more
complex than just better FPS tearing go away
but what i am seeing is looked like i was getting multiple tears
for a second there which could actually mean that our FPS went up you saw that
yes are you sure you hit alt-eye again you can do it in game and you'll get a
big display oh it's working oh wait it's working yeah oh this is this is working
yeah oh oh well that's cool it's very clear that this is definitely
performing better than we started so the overclocking utility works far
better than alex told me it was i mean should we give her more beans
sure what a great idea oh
oh ah see that means it works though
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video i'm gonna try something new and three to a different channel these gents
were actually just up visiting our friends at gamer's nexus as well and
it's definitely a worthwhile watch if you want to learn more about what makes
arc tick