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
developersIntel hate(s) that word.. perception. :DFor 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.
At this point I can't even...
One thing we can be sure of is Raja never used any of these gpu's :laugh:
Hell, ATI took only 25 years to fix their OpenGL driver :roll:
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...
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.
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.
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!