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.
"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.

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.
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.
Sources: Intel, via TechSpot
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45 Comments on Intel Detects 43 GPU Driver Bugs... By Watching a Review Video

#26
DeathtoGnomes
bugIt's almost never perceived as lack of QA. It's more like "oh, if we tested A and B separately and then also tested their integration, we would have caught this, who would have known?"
yea developersIntel hate(s) that word.. perception. :D
Posted on Reply
#27
Chaitanya
Crackong
Here is the response:


For company of the size of Intel never thought they lacked QA teams for software division, also where is that loudmouth Pat Gelsinger now? This whole saga is a good warning for enterprises not to rely on Intel for support.
Posted on Reply
#28
zlobby
Jeesus! It honestly feels like if we made a community project we'd have less bugs and drama!

At this point I can't even...
Posted on Reply
#29
LemmingOverlord
Do you know how much a team of QAs costs? Intel is saving millions by releasing pre-alpha drivers with pre-alpha hardware!!
Posted on Reply
#30
ThrashZone
Hi,
One thing we can be sure of is Raja never used any of these gpu's :laugh:
Posted on Reply
#31
zlobby
LemmingOverlordDo you know how much a team of QAs costs? Intel is saving millions by releasing pre-alpha drivers with pre-alpha hardware!!
It's working wondefully for them I see. :)
Posted on Reply
#32
GoldenX
GPU devs are media aware, believe me. They watch the content, it's just a matter of priorities and free time.
Hell, ATI took only 25 years to fix their OpenGL driver :roll:
Posted on Reply
#34
Wirko
ChaitanyaThis whole saga is a good warning for enterprises not to rely on Intel for support.
Haha. True. Enterprise guys should at least wait until Intel guys watch that ServeTheHome guy's review of Ponte Vecchio (or whatever comes next, in case PV is cancelled).
Posted on Reply
#35
wtfbbqlol
" as it attempts to break into a new market."

Intel has been in the graphics card market in some form since 1998 though!

I remember reading reviews on their i740 graphics card then. They later ditched it, went mostly integrated graphics, now going back to discrete add-on again...
Posted on Reply
#36
zlobby
wtfbbqlol" as it attempts to break into a new market."

Intel has been in the graphics card market in some form since 1998 though!

I remember reading reviews on their i740 graphics card then. They later ditched it, went mostly integrated graphics, now going back to discrete add-on again...
Ironically, their best iGPU was the one supplied by AMD.
Posted on Reply
#37
TheUn4seen
"Pressing this button should dispense candy but sometimes causes a deadly electric shock. The fix is expensive and I don't want to have this on my expenses sheet so I'll just say it's OK and someone else will take the cost." This "someone else" says "Nah, we'll fix it in production." QA was outsourced to a country where candy is outlawed so they don't test the candy dispensing functionality. Product goes out, some children get electrocuted and marketing does damage control by saying "we took our valued customers' suggestions to heart, decided to lower the shock value by 15% and give parents of children killed by our product a time limited 25 cent store credit because we love you so much." That's corporate product development for ya.

The thing with being a multi-billion dollar company is that you are essentially deaf to the outside world. Even in a small-ish company you face problems with people sending garbage data and feedback up the chain to make themselves look better or hide incompetence and laziness, or both. Multiply this by several thousand and you get a corporation where people lie all the time because they just don't care about anything other than what benefits them personally. Garbage in - garbage out, so if most of your internal feedback is trash coming from "yes men" and problems get trifled or ignored at several levels, guess what will be the output? You can create parallel feedback sources and incentivize doing actual work, but this costs money and effort so goes against everything a corporation stands for.
Posted on Reply
#38
Jimmy_
This is pretty bad tbh, not sure who is working on this product if they are filing by looking at reviews. Does it mean people who are working don't have any idea and experience? I might be wrong but for intel this is not acceptable :).
ThrashZoneHi,
One thing we can be sure of is Raja never used any of these gpu's :laugh:
Raja is leaving in a bubble where everything is perfectly working n running everything :D
Posted on Reply
#39
chrcoluk
ChaitanyaHere is the response:


For company of the size of Intel never thought they lacked QA teams for software division, also where is that loudmouth Pat Gelsinger now? This whole saga is a good warning for enterprises not to rely on Intel for support.
This debacle shows a problem I have longed not like, that they treat feedback from press more serious than feedback from their own paying customers. Some of these bugs were surely reported back, but I expect may not have passed the triage that normal customers have to navigate on tech support, whilst the press just bypass all that. Intel's own press statement even says they are looking at bugs found across other media outlets, but no mention of bugs reported by their own customers.
Posted on Reply
#40
Assimilator
chrcolukThis debacle shows a problem I have longed not like, that they treat feedback from press more serious than feedback from their own paying customers. Some of these bugs were surely reported back, but I expect may not have passed the triage that normal customers have to navigate on tech support, whilst the press just bypass all that. Intel's own press statement even says they are looking at bugs found across other media outlets, but no mention of bugs reported by their own customers.
Exactly.

Because they don't care actually about customer experience or the quality of their products, they care about how they are perceived and whether that negatively affects their share price. If not, they don't give a rat's ass.

Intel is no longer an 800-pound gorilla, it's an 800-pound zombie gorilla: not quite dead yet but rotting from the inside.
Posted on Reply
#41
Aquinus
Resident Wat-man
DavenYou 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.
You do realize that there are a lot of driver files for GPUs that you're not likely using when you download an AMD or nVidia driver. You can have a much smaller footprint if you install just what's needed for the hardware you have, but you introduce the possibility of getting it wrong. More code means more bugs, it's quite literally that simple. In theory it makes sense, in practice... well, you see how it went. Probably not worth the bad publicity, but I think Intel has gotten used to that by now.
Posted on Reply
#42
shovenose
I’m eagerly awaiting my asrock a380, it’s in UPS’s hands now.

That said, why not just give a couple hundred Intel employees the GPU and send them home with it and tell them here’s a free GPU, play around with it, game on it, and report any issues.

That would likely have found out these basic bugs!
Posted on Reply
#43
Assimilator
shovenoseI’m eagerly awaiting my asrock a380, it’s in UPS’s hands now.

That said, why not just give a couple hundred Intel employees the GPU and send them home with it and tell them here’s a free GPU, play around with it, game on it, and report any issues.

That would likely have found out these basic bugs!
Because that would require logic and forethought from Intel management.
Posted on Reply
#44
bug
AssimilatorBecause that would require logic and forethought from Intel management.
It would mean to acknowledge the QA department is not up to par.
Posted on Reply
#45
Assimilator
bugIt would mean to acknowledge the QA department is not up to par.
QA can only report defects, QA cannot fix defects, and if management is hellbent on releasing a product on a specific date and are willing to bypass QA from blocking that release due to quality issues, then it doesn't matter how good or bad or offshored QA is.
Posted on Reply
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