Arc or not to Arc

[Apocalypsee]

I kinda veered toward buying Arc as I seen A750 is unbelievably cheap, half the price of RX 6650 XT. Though I kinda excited for it I do play a lot of old games which made me worry of buying this card. Latest game I play is original Witcher I wonder hows it handle this game, and do anyone actually have this card play old games with it?

 

[P4-630]

IIRC it doesn't run DX9.0 games?...

Someone correct me if I'm mistaken.

 

[Calenhad]

IIRC it doesn't run DX9.0 games?...

Someone correct me if I'm mistaken.

By emulation (DX12 wrapper iirc), which supposedly is getting quite good. I do not own any ARC product though, so YMMV.

 

[Solid State Soul ( SSS )]

Buy amd, intel arc is so much worse than first gen ryzen launch woes

 

[Double-Click]

I'd stick with AMD over Intel for a budget option, there's still too much jank to deal with by contrast.

 

[Solaris17]

I kinda veered toward buying Arc as I seen A750 is unbelievably cheap, half the price of RX 6650 XT. Though I kinda excited for it I do play a lot of old games which made me worry of buying this card. Latest game I play is original Witcher I wonder hows it handle this game, and do anyone actually have this card play old games with it?

Yeah they work fine for the most part. I am sure if you went digging like with my other manufacturer you would find odd problems with things that are super old or niche, I have had a lot of success playing older games even going as far as dx8.

You will find a lot of people that don’t even own these cards commenting still that it’s an absolute train wreck, but the big driver issues are gone and now it’s more performance improvements. If you are thinking of playing with a card in the midrange already then the 750 is a good option

 

[Apocalypsee]

Yeah they work fine for the most part. I am sure if you went digging like with my other manufacturer you would find odd problems with things that are super old or niche, I have had a lot of success playing older games even going as far as dx8.

You will find a lot of people that don’t even own these cards commenting still that it’s an absolute train wreck, but the big driver issues are gone and now it’s more performance improvements. If you are thinking of playing with a card in the midrange already then the 750 is a good option

Spec wise its very beefy for its price (256bit bus width, 112 ROP etc those are high end stuff) and RT performance is better than Radeons since it got actual hardware for it. Stable diffusion runs well on them as well, perhaps I should just go all for A770 16GB but time will tell.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Yeah they work fine for the most part. I am sure if you went digging like with my other manufacturer you would find odd problems with things that are super old or niche, I have had a lot of success playing older games even going as far as dx8.

You will find a lot of people that don’t even own these cards commenting still that it’s an absolute train wreck, but the big driver issues are gone and now it’s more performance improvements. If you are thinking of playing with a card in the midrange already then the 750 is a good option

Agreed. With the exception that the A750 is often under $200 in the U.S., and here in late 2023 that's firmly entry level not mid range.

I have been nothing but impressed with how things have come along with ARC. Both my A750 and A380 are the best cards in their price tier IMO. As mentioned by others, better ray tracing and upscaling than AMD. Nvidia offerings at similar prices are a joke; they abandoned the market.

I can combine XeSS and ray traced reflections at 1080 and have an enjoyable experience in Spiderman Miles Morales with an $100 A380. The extra 2GB of ram is a nice bonus over the more expensive 6400 and 1650 too.

Starfield started off rough, and this latest beta patch is bad juju for ARC so far. But playing on my game pass version with the A750, the game went from broken at launch. To 1080 low with heavy FSR to get blurry but semi playable. To 1080 low with only a little FSR. To now being 1080 medium at native with VRS and never dropping under 30fps even in MAST where everyone tests. If they get ARC worked into the new patch, hopefully there is another 15% or more performance uplift to be had.

 

[DavidC1]

By emulation (DX12 wrapper iirc), which supposedly is getting quite good. I do not own any ARC product though, so YMMV.

That was back late last year. DX9 is now a native driver and performs much better, even though relatively it still needs optimization.

 

[lemonadesoda]

A310 low profile for AV1? A750 if you want to game.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

A310 low profile for AV1? A750 if you want to game.

Only if the A310 separates itself in price more dramatically from the A380 slot powered. At least here in the U.S. They are presently $20 apart, and when the ASRock LP A380 is on sale they are the same price, or at best $10 apart. It makes the A380 an easy pick for me at those prices.

 

[iameatingjam]

I usually do recommend the arc cards I think they are good value but since you specifically mentioned playing old games... yeah I think you're better off with amd. Old games are arc's weakness. Then again you could always go with the a750 it will probably work well enough in most of the games, and you help the industry by supporting the underdog, but thats if you want to help intel and not yourself...

Amd's drivers have experience in all those years of the past, all the patches and everything, arc just runs older apis through a translator.

That being said, intel's drivers are improving fast, the a770 is the cheapest 16Gb card you can get, they all have a nice big wide bus (even the a580). If we look at transistor counts intel wins by a mile.

But you specifically mentioned old games thats why I'm conflicted here.

 

[Solaris17]

Lets take it easy on the this and that. Instead lets keep on topic and feel free to share experiences.

I personally have thought this for awhile but now have a moment to jot it down. As someone that has a 4090 I try to approach all these things rationally and I would like to validate some points that ties in with my previous tongue in cheek post.

For certain. The ARC launch was a disaster. This has many sides, such as the belief that Intel driver teams are just terrible, but I dont think thats the case and leads me into my main point.

It is important to look at trending. And the user experience. Unfortunetely these are not mutually exclusive. Which is why people hold there opinions for so long even if they are wrong.

Look at tech sites. The cadence currently is every few months. This is great. It shows that from say Jan to April ARC performance went up. But they sometimes avg this. Then you get things like "10%" in a 4 months span.

This is disingenuous. The ARC driver team is cranking them out. Look at the FW matrix. In some cases they are 2 to 4 days apart. Less then a week between releases. For the ARC user, these drivers provide something that is missed in overarching 4-6month "rebenches".

In some cases a single driver release is improving games dramatically. From not playable to playable, or providing improvements like 30fps to 67fps now type of scenarios. Alllll the way to bugs, like it crashes randomly, to now it doesnt crash at all.

Big rebenches dont cover this and the averaging of performance uplifts further dilute the amount of progress actually being done. While the general message is nice "performance is improving" it fails to cover the actual significant (and for the gamer relevant) milestones.

So its important to keep in mind when judging ARC you should atleast while its in its infancy try to look at the micro not macro information as well.


Back on topic. My experience has been great. I am frequently as I am sure you have seen working with these cards, in either development or gaming and the changes and improvements are SIGNIFICANT. I will echo my previous post in that if you dont think ARC a worthy buy you are misinformed.

As for OP and if you should get an A770 instead. well I will always vote for the 770 personally.

 

[Apocalypsee]

As for OP and if you should get an A770 instead. well I will always vote for the 770 personally.

That is fine but the 8GB is reasonably priced, can't say the same for 16GB tho its rather expensive

 

[Vya Domus]

There is a reason they are so cheap, they are still heavily reliant on driver improvements to get decent performance. It's also not going to be that much of an upgrade over your 1070.

 

[TumbleGeorge]

That is fine but the 8GB is reasonably priced, can't say the same for 16GB tho its rather expensive

$290. $300 $330 all with AC Mirage include. Prices maybe is not so greater than A770 8GB. Not sure whose model is better for use.

 

[Dristun]

If you're planning to use SD, spending extra for 16GB model is absolutely worth it. Especially once you start venturing into img2vid or txt2vid (which I'm not sure are viable on 8GB at all). Like, especially considering that it's not that fast on the A770 in general, being able to run bigger batches is a godsend with more VRAM.

 

[Nike_486DX]

Driver issues and bad efficiency, thats why arcs are so cheap.

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

Driver issues and bad efficiency, thats why arcs are so cheap.

Why does everyone assume/think that drivers can come out a lab & be prefect?
This the most unrealistic part of everyone talking about ARC since it launched.
Labs cannot have the vast diversity of setups that out there to make prefect drivers.
Nvidia & AMD always release updated drivers for newer games that release too.

 

[Solaris17]

Lets take it easy on the this and that. Instead lets keep on topic and feel free to share experiences

One last time

 

[ZoneDymo]

I can right now buy an A750 for about 230 euro or an RX6650XT for 250.

it would be an upgrade from the RX480 but really.... I think I want to go for something more along the lines of the RX6700XT in terms of performance.

 

[TumbleGeorge]

One more reason to think for Intel Arc.

 

[Vayra86]

Especially for older games good legacy support is everything. These games also need to run on current day monitors and CPUs.

Nvidia or AMD for this purpose. There is no question

 

[DavidC1]

Amd's drivers have experience in all those years of the past, all the patches and everything, arc just runs older apis through a translator.

No it doesn't. It used to, but it doesn't anymore, it changed partially back late last year, but now the transition is complete. And it only applied for DX9 and older titles, hence why it was called D3D9on12, not D3D9to11on12. DX11 performs subpar because they are used to integrated graphics and dGPUs with far higher performance expose driver bottlenecks which wasn't needed to be addressed, not because DX11 is using a wrapper. They are fixing DX11 driver stack too for lower overhead. Right now whitelisting games, but soon enough the new DX11 driver stack will be applied to all DX11 titles.

I think some people believing DX11 driver stack is using a wrapper may be partially based on weird fantasy of having a huge performance increase. I would say cut it out, because it's not on a wrapper, but needs optimizations. You'll see decent gains, but not 60% average as with DX9.

Also the only reason Intel has any chance of being a big 3rd competitor unlike the Chinese company Moore Threads is that Intel had decades of iGPUs, while Moore Threads is starting from scratch. The basis is not the best, but Intel has some.

 

[iameatingjam]

No it doesn't. It used to, but it doesn't anymore, it changed partially back late last year, but now the transition is complete. And it only applied for DX9 and older titles, hence why it was called D3D9on12, not D3D9to11on12. DX11 performs subpar because they are used to integrated graphics and dGPUs with far higher performance expose driver bottlenecks which wasn't needed to be addressed, not because DX11 is using a wrapper. They are fixing DX11 driver stack too for lower overhead. Right now whitelisting games, but soon enough the new DX11 driver stack will be applied to all DX11 titles.

I think some people believing DX11 driver stack is using a wrapper may be partially based on weird fantasy of having a huge performance increase. I would say cut it out, because it's not on a wrapper, but needs optimizations. You'll see decent gains, but not 60% average as with DX9.

Also the only reason Intel has any chance of being a big 3rd competitor unlike the Chinese company Moore Threads is that Intel had decades of iGPUs, while Moore Threads is starting from scratch. The basis is not the best, but Intel has some.

I see. So intel now runs all apis natively. Wow, thats impressive. I must have been on outdated info. I'm totally on team arc here, so thats music to my ears.