who in their right mind would choose anything but the best possible solution
for the money I've never been able to figure it out but then against my
deepest instincts that is exactly what I
did and me for 30 days we have both been
running Intel Arc gpus in our primary gaming rigs dealing with everything from
Annoying software to low performance
drivers to Broken functionality I haven't been able to play Minecraft
dungeons with my kids in a month yikes
but then I don't know what maybe halfway through about halfway I think yeah yeah
something happened I stopped doing the arc Challenge and I started just using
my computer yeah I kind of just forgot about it I still have some bones to pick
with Intel's GPU team to be very clear but like that urgent feeling I had to
just like work it out of my computer well it's been replaced with like I'm
gonna do it still but uh I'll get around to it get around to it eventually right
most of the problems I was having were more related to potentially the
applications or games that just have problems all the time like we play Star
Citizen yeah well like and sure there
was problems but it was Star Citizen I played tarkov same deal not many of the
issues were clearly attributable to just the arc GPU itself and we're obviously
not the only ones the a770 has 4.3 eggs
out of five on NewEgg and just shy of four stars on Amazon for a product we
wrote off then rooted for then completely wrote off
that's kind of outstanding pretty good pretty good like our sponsor thorum
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foreign
for the conspiracy theorists out there no this challenge was not sponsored by
Intel and what better way to prove it than to open with all the things that
went wrong a lot of things went wrong first up is my issues with VR I did
eventually get it working thanks to a closed alpha driver from Intel but
to say that it's not ideal would be an understatement I can mostly play
stationary games like beat saber but anything even marginally more demanding
especially with movement is a big
problem I can only play the virtual reality Rick and Morty game for about 20
minutes at a time for example before succumbing to nausea so just like in our
last challenge VR was essentially a no-go for me and even worse that
marginal VR experience cost me basic
functionality on the same PC here in the
rec room that my kids use for couch gaming so I was woken up early on more
than one Saturday because the TV won't turn on which seems to be some kind of
display wake bug in the alpha driver I won't hold that against them though
not when there are plenty of inconveniences in the public drivers
that I can hold against them like what is this why do I have to look at this
limited DisplayPort functionality message every time my PC wakes from
sleep the worst part is there's no limited functionality it's working fine
I don't know for sure if it's actually caused by Arc but I've never seen this
message before so have you received a notification from it that you have
wanted to see no I can't say that I have yikes yeah I
ran into things like that a lot system crashes with no Event Viewer logs weird
graphical issues mostly with Reflections in various games really spiky lag and I
don't know I saw that in Halo infinite yeah it's in a range of different games
but not all of them which is weird I I
can't say for sure that any of this was actually caused by Arc but I've never
really seen anything like it before and full disclosure I already pulled out my
a770 for the tarkov wipe I tried at the
beginning of the wipe and it was horrible and okay it was over a month
and a half so the fact that we're filming this now and it's already out is
fine all right but I installed at the beginning of the wipe it was terrible
okay I installed my previous card
still terrible oh but not quite as
terrible but that's probably a gap in price and yada yada
the truth is I actually pulled one already too
but for good reason I'm the kids couldn't play it takes two on the rec
room PC because of the blank display issue and it was at like 29 days anyway
a couple of other lingering issues though with my setup are to do with
black levels and cable compatibility cable compatibility
this one is bizarre active cables like
fiber optic HDMI or DisplayPort cables
just outright do not seem to work on Arc
it's fine to run a standard cable into a
Thunderbolt card then run Optical Thunderbolt to a dock then plug a
standard cable from the dock into the monitor but I couldn't run any long run
cables like these ones straight out of the back of the a770 to a display
without getting a garbled image or most
of the time no image at all it makes no
sense to me because I would think that a cable with its own built-in signal
repeater would you know be even less
susceptible to low signal strength on the video output which is usually the
issue in these cases but I didn't imagine this Intel seems to have been
able to reproduce my issue on their end and are apparently working on a fix
oh ah those run all the insulin speakers that will be a video get subscribed
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check out the black levels on this display I messaged them about this a
while back I think this started when I first connected my projector to the
secondary output of the card through a Thunderbolt Hub and Optical Thunderbolt
cable of course but I've since disconnected that and updated my drivers
and it doesn't seem to have improved now there would be nothing of normal
about this if I was on an LCD display but this is an OLED
this is a black background and it is distinctly Gray
now I think I have a theory actually I have a couple of theories first of all
watch this when I switch it over to HDR
the problem goes away it's now black if I plug into my wife's
computer running an NVIDIA card well it doesn't matter if it's SDR or HDR it
works fine so I think it's something to
do with SDR video and the full versus
limited RGB range values but I don't see
any obvious way to change that in the arc Control software
which software okay yeah that is
definitely another ongoing problem I talked about that plenty in part one or
1.5 or whatever it was but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop now Intel's
approach to GPU software literally makes no sense to me at all if you already
have a desktop GPU controller and you do yeah for the onboard Graphics why do you
need our control another app and I
hesitate to even call it that because it's an overlay that also does almost
nothing even the built-in driver updater doesn't really like work I didn't get
notifications for new drivers and when I set it to update automatically I did the
same thing it didn't work I did the same thing I set it to update automatically
on Sundays at 2 A.M I came back two
weeks after an updated dropped and there was no update and then when I went to
manually update I had to click it three times to get it to start doing anything
and then it had no progress indicator whatsoever so we were actually gaming
together at the time time Luke and my son are both waiting for me well I'm
sitting here going look we're about to play CS go I need this driver update
and I have no idea how long it's gonna take I ended up getting it through the
Intel driver updater not even art control because it just didn't work
which frustrating because the driver updates that landed while we were doing the
challenge were actually really impressive yes Arc gpus ironically
really struggle in older games and this
is for a number of reasons architecturally they were designed for
newer apis dx12 Vulcan in particular and
on the software side Intel's Arc team hasn't spent the last 20 years coming up
through those generations of games so there's a lot of holes dx9 in particular
is not supported in Hardware at all on Arc Alchemist and Intel shifted strategy
last summer to rely on emulation to support these games which has led to
some kind of embarrassing results but we
got to see a lot of that change right before our eyes they pulled off double
almost triple digit performance improvements right smack in the middle
of the challenge taking some key problem games from embarrassing to acceptable
pretty much overnight and the way that they did it is really cool DX VK was
originally developed for porting native Windows games to Linux it is not
emulation but rather a translation layer
that takes DirectX API calls and converts them to an equivalent Vulcan
API call it's a key component of the proton compatibility tool that powers
the valve steam deck and the thing is while it was designed for Linux nothing
prevents you from using it on say Windows I mean the first proof of
concept that I saw on this was done manually by an end user the difference
is that Now Intel is taking that and baking it right into their drivers but
that isn't to say that they're suddenly perfect here's some footage of a CS go
gaming session with Luke running on the dxvk driver see I wasn't lying these are
bad and that's one of the games that was
specifically called out as improved by Intel yeah and this is another yikes
aside from performance stutters I also got a completely black screen when I was
trying to access the menu which is why I couldn't change teams for a while there
I wouldn't describe these dips and performance as constant and when they
weren't happening it was performing really well but they were definitely
regular the weird thing is I just thought he was bad because mine was
running fine the frustrating thing about its failings is that when Arc does well
it does really well I was sure when we
fired up Star Citizen it just wasn't gonna work we're gonna be watching a
slide I thought it was going to be an absolute crap show terrible right but it
was actually fine it was just a less powerful GPU than what I had before but
it was no problem at least no more of a problem than anything is in Star Citizen
fair enough and I saw the same in Halo infinite aside from just being less
powerful than my 3090 it was fine
once I adjusted my expectations right and turned off Reflections yeah I'm not
sure it's Reflections specifically but I had some pretty bad problems I can only
really describe it as purple lights I had no idea what you were talking about
until finally I saw it at the end of the Star Citizen session okay yeah that's
actually helpful it's it's really weird turning Reflections down or even off in
some situations can tend to resolve them pretty much across the board but I
basically just did that and then completely forgot about it because some
level of reflection would still work it was kind of a wake-up call actually for
me doing this challenge like when we review a new GPU we are so laser focused
on new rendering features like Ray tracing or who provides the utmost in
image quality with all the details cranked or whatever who has three
percent more FPS but in the real world when I'm sitting in a dark room hanging
out with the boys clicking heads those little details don't matter all I really
care about is is the frame delivery smooth enough which is probably why Arc
is ending up with these four star reviews I mean obsessive enthusiasts are
going to compare and contrast with the best that NVIDIA and AMD have to offer
and they're gonna find it sorely lacking yeah not really gonna work out there but
I mean think about it it wasn't that long ago for me that turning off that
setting that just like doesn't work was just a fact of life and I didn't worry
about it what's the difference here well the
difference is that we're talking about spending your own hard-earned money
versus using whatever your parents have to bring home from Best Buy this is a
product that you chose true and there are experiential problems that need to
be addressed aside from like oh I can't enable Hair Works oh no extraneous Bulls
some of it's small like slow driver download speeds but some of it is big
like that art control center is a giant steaming pile of okay I have to tell you
though self-centered Intel refuses to provide
an exact timeline or any other details but they heard you and everyone they
know the overlay sucks yes it's going
away good we're getting a non-overlay single app that will have everything
Consolidated into one pain it should
have never even existed I know I know but you got to give them credit where
it's due okay yeah and like the OBS recording issue that I ran into when I
was testing av1 encoding shouldn't probably have really existed have been a
problem either it was super cool yes 20 of the time it worked and yes like
immediately after it was updated and fixed and that wasn't even an Intel
issue in the first place that was an OBS issue which is kind of what I'm talking
about whether it's working with Partners or listening to community feedback
they're kind of on it and as critical as
this Series has been I mean even most of this video was not exactly positive and
as much as I'm absolutely still taking my a770 out as soon as this camera stops
rolling in the last 30 days alone it's gotten
worlds better which gives me a lot of Hope for the future
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today with code LTT if you guys enjoyed this video maybe go back and check out
part one or better yet if you enjoy these kinds of challenges why don't you
check out Luke's Blackberry challenge where he switched to a BlackBerry
it's an amazing video you should check that