Monday, August 22nd 2022
Intel Detects 43 GPU Driver Bugs... By Watching a Review Video
Intel has been in the firing lines for the consecutive delays and general lack of clarity surrounding the launch of its Arc Alchemist family of discrete GPUs. Staggered availability has meant that the only currently available Arc GPU - the A380 - is still only available in the Chinese market, where the Internet café game is still strong. Intel drivers in particular have been fraught with bugs and as we know, software can bring even the most competent hardware to its knees. So there's maybe an echo of warning bells to the real state of Arc's software suite when Intel admits to having detected 43 different GPU driver bugs... While watching a review video from Gamers Nexus.
We've conducted our own review of Intel's Arc A380 (after importing it from China), and we did call to attention how we "encountered numerous bugs including bluescreens, corrupted desktop after startup, random systems hangs, system getting stuck during shutdown sequences, and more." Only AMD and NVIDIA seem to have an idea on just how complex the matter of breaking into and maintaining a position in this particular product segment takes. Intel itself is still in the process of learning just what that takes, as its own VP and general manager of the Visual Computing Group, Lisa Pearce, penned in a blog post.
Sources:
Intel, via TechSpot
We've conducted our own review of Intel's Arc A380 (after importing it from China), and we did call to attention how we "encountered numerous bugs including bluescreens, corrupted desktop after startup, random systems hangs, system getting stuck during shutdown sequences, and more." Only AMD and NVIDIA seem to have an idea on just how complex the matter of breaking into and maintaining a position in this particular product segment takes. Intel itself is still in the process of learning just what that takes, as its own VP and general manager of the Visual Computing Group, Lisa Pearce, penned in a blog post.
"For example, we filed 43 issues with our engineering team from a review of the A380 by Gamers Nexus. We had corrected 4 of those issues by the end of July. Since then, we corrected 21 UI issues in our driver release on August 19, and it also includes Day 0 support for Saints Row, Madden NFL 23, fixes for Stray and Horizon Zero Dawn crashes, Marvel's Spider-Man performance fix, and fixes on SmoothSync corruptions. We are taking similar approaches with reports from other press reviews.It's important that Intel is taking the feedback and review process to heart - but then again, that's the least that can be expected from a multi-billion dollar company as it attempts to break into a new market. It still strikes us as... noteworthy that years into development, multiple delayed launch dates, and promotions galore for some of the designers behind Arc Alchemist have somehow led us to this place in time, where Intel's hopes seem to be bogged down left and right.
We are continuing to learn what it will take for us to be successful. Some of the issues were related to our installer and how it downloaded unique components after initial installation. This allows us to have a smaller initial download to get users started quicker. But unexpected failures are causing that process to be unreliable, and later this year we will be moving to a combined package that is downloaded and installed all at once. No more installer issues.
45 Comments on Intel Detects 43 GPU Driver Bugs... By Watching a Review Video
You only have to download a 1 MB file 450 times instead of a 450 MB file once. Now that’s progress! And AMD and Nvidia never thought of it.
I will say it again. Intel does not know how to make complex drivers. If its a single .dll .inf and a security file, they seem to be a little better, but even then, they mess up on a regular basis. The fact that Intel has never addressed this is telling of the management and priorities of the company.
so yeah...not great.
That said the title is a bit click baity, as GN points out, its good they take this to heart and work on fixing it.
Obviously this should not be needed for such basic flaws...but it is what it is and Intel is doing the right thing now.
I read somewhere that Nvidia has way more software engineers than hardware. If true, this is really smart. Since Intel treats chips as a commodity market to be bought and sold like gold or oil and not technology providing a function, I’m not sure their corporate culture will ever adapt to an up and down software/hardware development scheme. Institutional corporate memory seems too engrained no matter how many execs they replace.
Joking aside, this is actually scary. Imho, nobody realistically expects Intel to go toe to toe with Nvidia and AMD on their fist iteration. Pricing and driver quality will dictate whether Intel earns mindshare or not. And they seem to be pretty lax about the drivers.
They could make the driver downloadable alone.
The impact of these bugs, and how easily Gamers Nexus was able to find them, is. To put it bluntly, most of those bugs are critical enough that it effectively breaks the product as a whole. No sane company would even think about launching a product in such a poor state; this is pre-alpha at best.
Yet Intel went ahead and did it anyway. Not to some beta testers, but to the entirety of China. What does that say about the company?
It says that Intel's contempt for its customers is so much that it doesn't even feel obliged to ship them a working product. If a Kickstarter project did that, people would be demanding their money back and very vocally complaining online if that didn't happen. Yet we have the legions of Intel apologists telling us this is okay, it's acceptable, it's normal, of course Intel make good on their promise, we just have to trust them and wait.
That's bullshit and if you have ever insinuated something like that you should be incredibly ashamed of yourself. Your complicity in Intel's anti-consumer stance is exactly what allows companies to get away with such vile behaviour.
If I was from China, I would be incredibly insulted that Intel apparently sees my country as only good enough to alpha-test crappy products.They would never do anything that useful or helpful, if they do that they can't add their shitty unnecessary "Control Centre" that is basically nothing more than a telemetry harvester.
Of course, as Intel found out, that raises the problem of getting things to work after you download them individually. I imagine this is not as simple as having a bunch of services talk to each other, but may require replacing shaders on-the-fly and whatnot.
Be that as it may, it's an internal implementation detail, it should be entirely transparent to the user.
Maybe as @Assimilator suggested they just added this new telemetry to use us a beta testers.
One more point, not sure what anyone else has seen, but aside from GN, Techspot, and the aforementioned single line in the review here, all the information I've seen about Intel's GPU efforts, they've been described as a great first attempt, just needs some driver polish, etc. It's good to know a few sites will tell the whole story..
teamperson that does CPUs mainly.