Intel talks about quality a lot today
they had the opportunity to walk that talk and this is what it looked like
you know how we mock apple for going out on stage year after year after year this
year's iphone is the best iphone that we
have ever created it's ridiculous right
obviously the new one is better and water is also wet right
well after seeing this laptop
i'm never gonna laugh at that again because thanks to Intel's long-awaited
arc a370 discrete GPU the new spectre
x360 from hp is actually worse than the
old rtx 3050 model and not just by a
little bit now slow that i could overlook but buggy to the
point where alex described some of its functions as barely working
that's an embarrassment for any organization let alone one the size of
Intel now obviously these are very strong
claims we're making here but don't worry
unfortunately we've got receipts and we'll show them to you after this
word from our sponsor busonic their elite xg321ug mini led monitor offers a
4k native resolution ips panel with a 144hz refresh rate and it comes with
g-sync ultimate r4 and a quantum dot color layer so it's great for gamers or
creators learn more at the link down below
as the writer of this video i want to make it clear that i did not want to do
this i've had lengthy calls with Intel's engineers and worked really hard to show
the strengths of Intel's arc because i'm excited for it
i was two years old the last time a new player entered the discrete GPU market
and i was not sure it would ever happen again but i was i was hopeful
i wanted this to be positive because AMD and NVIDIA's duopoly has been in clear
need of some disruption but unfortunately i can only review the
hardware that's in front of me and it's a dumpster fire the naming scheme for
art graphics goes arc 3 arc 5 and arc 7.
so the a370m in our spectre x360 16 inch is
kind of like the best of their i3 tier
discrete gpus follow along so far good based on its
positioning then Intel had no expectations that it would be able to
beat the rtx 3050 in gaming and they
were correct about that in our testing the 3050 is a solid 30
percent faster in games despite being confined to the same chassis which
wouldn't be a problem except that the arc equipped version is priced
dollars higher oh and also in certain games even AMD's
integrated graphics are able to beat it with that said this performance level is
kind of acceptable given that Intel isn't really marketing this as a gaming
card at 1080p on medium to low settings you
can get a playable experience in most games and aside from occasional
stuttering we barely saw any driver issues
i mean Intel wasn't expecting to beat NVIDIA gaming instead they want to
leverage hardware encoders to beat them at content creation and it's to the
point where 40 of the dye area is actually dedicated to non-traditional
gaming things let's talk about that each Intel arc GPU
is made up of render slices and the main difference between a low end and a
high-end GPU from Intel is the number of render slices so the a370m has eight of
them in each render slice you'll find four xe cores that are comprised of 16
xe vector engines these are what take care of rendering your games each being
roughly equivalent to an execution unit in Intel's igpus you'll also find 16 xe
matrix engines which are dedicated to ai tasks like upscaling
along with the 4xe course you get 4 ray tracing units along with some other
stuff to you know make it actually work as a GPU
all of this hardware dedicated to ai and matrix manipulation means then that in
tasks like topaz video enhance ai video encoding and up sampling should work
incredibly well and they do
doubling the resolution of this Floatplane exclusive video that we
downloaded at 480p actually gave us a small win for Intel we got .22 seconds
per frame compared to NVIDIA's 0.24
or at least we did when the Intel system worked
most of the time NVIDIA won by simply not crashing
in davinci resolve Intel was able to leverage their av-1 encoders though to
pull out a huge win against the 3050. though again this was by default because
you can't do av1 encoding on the 3050 so we have no way to compare performance
apples to apples not to mention that av1 encoding is only
just beginning to find its usefulness in 2022.
can't say the same about the wan hoodie though it's full of pockets and looks
awesome lttstore.com in handbrake we
well let's just say the numbers that we are about to show you took three days of
back and forth with Intel's engineers as of june 22nd 2022 here's what you arc
owners out there all dozens of you will need to do to use handbrake
first get the latest drivers not from Windows update not from Intel's driver
utility but rather you will need to check a blog post to see if they've
posted anything new then you'll need the latest nightly
version of handbrake off of github the mainline version does not support Intel
arc yet at this point you'll have to be very
very careful not to let Windows update run because for whatever reason Windows
update will roll back the GPU drivers to
an older version and if this happens it will completely break handbrake and
you'll have to uninstall and remove everything from app data and start over
once all that's complete you can set up your render NVIDIA's rtx 3050 was able
to render out that 4k Floatplane exclusive which by the way you can watch
if you go over to flipplane.com in 10 minutes and 1 seconds
then with the same settings our Intel arc a370m
didn't get past zero percent the video memory filled up and then nothing
happened after a call with Intel's engineers we realized that we had used a strange
resolution and by using a different 1080p file the a370m actually completed
that video in code in just two-thirds the time of the 30-50.
wow so when Intel is able to get their video
encoders to consistently work arc might be a compelling value for video editors
or maybe as an encoding coprocessor if you have a real GPU in your system
the real disappointment here though isn't that a developer version of
handbrake doesn't encode weird resolutions it's that Windows will screw
up your drivers remember that whole wintel alliance
thing i mean if there's one thing i expect from Intel it's that they're
gonna work with microsoft to give you a seamless experience out of the box
this was anything but anywho
another way to leverage ark's ai capabilities is xe super sampling it's
Intel's take on NVIDIA dlss and it sounds great especially when you've got
an underpowered GPU that needs all the upsampling that it can do
the problem is that it needs to be enabled on a per game basis
oh and also it isn't available yet so even though there's a bunch of
apparently very impressive ai hardware on the a370m the software side is so
incomplete that we weren't able to show you a single demo of that hardware i'm
kind of reminded of NVIDIA's rtx launch except that that included a really fast
GPU as well one area Intel should excel though is
power management in laptops there's a very small budget for power compared to
desktops and making sure that that power is shared between the CPU and GPU
properly can net you more performance and better battery life across the board
to achieve this Intel arc laptops have a control loop that monitors what the CPU
and the GPU are doing and designs power targets every 100 milliseconds GPU
activity is the main driver here and they'll give the GPU more power until it
starts to be starved for utilization at which point they'll start allocating
power budget back to the CPU now currently on gaming laptops setting
your CPU and GPU power targets independently can net you 15 more FPS if
you absolutely nail that balance can also lose you 15 performance if you get
it wrong so this is a welcome addition
now NVIDIA does have a similar feature called dynamic boost 2.0 but on paper
Intel's approach will allow for much greater flexibility when it comes to
power allocation except that in our testing the old
spectre x360 remember with the NVIDIA GPU and also further hampered by an 11th
gen CPU got better battery life
in talking to both Intel and hp this
shouldn't have happened but in talking to Intel more
so many aspects of this review should
have gone better and yet they didn't so it's clear that Intel needs more time
to get the bugs ironed out which raises the question
why is this for sale well from our point of view Intel is
kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place here on the one hand they've got
to get the software right if somebody buys an Intel GPU today and has a
terrible experience you can bet they're not going to be back for round two when
battle mage drops even if it does end up being competitive with the best from a
indian NVIDIA but then at the same time they have to get these out the door
before NVIDIA's rtx 4000 series is announced the last thing they want to do
is launch their top end arc a780 only to
have it get embarrassed by an rtx 4050
ti they also can only find so many
problems in their own lab so yeah i guess this is me saying the quiet
part out loud the people that buy an arc GPU now are essentially beta testers for
Intel alex alone has now found multiple
bugs that are now in the queue to be fixed
it's just too bad that the timeline slipped so far if they had actually been
able to release this in q1 like they had planned i'm sure loads of gamers would
have been okay being an early adopter just to get their hands on literally
anything to play games with now with GPU prices getting back to msrp
or in some cases even below that early adopter tax it's gonna be a
lot harder to swallow does this mean then that Intel's arc gpus are a
complete dud well no
something everyone seems to have kind of forgotten at this point is how terrible
ryzen was when it first launched there were firmware bugs we had multiple
motherboards just spontaneously brick you needed super specific RAM sticks to
even to get it to post and even then that RAM probably couldn't run at its
rated speed despite verizon being so reliant on fast memory to perform well i
mean heck there were usb bugs that have only been recently sorted out
so i don't want to count out Intel's arc just yet i mean if you think about it
it's truly incredible that Intel was able to ship a discrete GPU at all and i
genuinely hope that in a year we're going to be praising it
but today like alex said we can only review the
hardware in front of us and i just
can't fresh books when you're building a business you're passionate about it's
easy to feel like there aren't enough hours in the day and if you're doing all
the invoicing and accounting on your own you're probably spending time on work
you don't love freshbooks is built for business owners like you it's the
all-in-one accounting software that saves entrepreneurs and freelancers up
to 11 hours per week that's 11 hours you could spend nailing a client pitch
serving your customers or honing your craft from billing sending and following
up on invoices to tracking and managing expenses to processing online payments
freshbook automates and simplifies all the tough and annoying parts of running
your own business it's also super easy to get up and running with award-winning
freshbooks support team that always is available to answer your questions try
freshbooks today for 30 days no credit card required go to freshbooks.com Linus
to get more time back and build a business you love
well that was quite a train wreck if you want to watch something that worked out
surprisingly well instead of surprisingly poorly maybe check out the
video where we hot rod at a steam deck it's kinda awesome