uftfaGood job, Intel. While then internet is filled with angry and emotional childen who just want to see Intel fail, I'm just glad they're continuing to toil away at the drivers. The GPU pricing from nvidia and also AMD to a lesser extent have gone completely haywire. Solid competition is very welcome.

I would not be surprised that once Intel is at parity with Nvidia their prices will also be at parity.

but yes. Always good to have more choices.

It will take a few generations really to start being competitive at all fronts. And i'm also talking about 24 hours driver updates on the release of new games.

mechtechI would not be surprised that once Intel is at parity with Nvidia their prices will also be at parity.

In the very long term, no doubt about it.

But for now, they have to fight tooth and nail, offer exceptional value to build significant market share which is their first order of priority.

sam_86314But will these optimizations come to the more niche titles?

One of my favorite DX9 games is Dragon's Dogma. It's definitely a bit of an underrated gem that didn't get too much attention on release, from what I know.

I already use DXVK to run it better on my laptop (Xe 80EU), which actually works very well. In fact, DXVK seems to work better than whatever Intel's official solution is.

Apparently that's exactly what Intel's using in this latest driver.

www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/12/intel-using-dxvk-part-of-steam-proton-for-their-windows-arc-gpu-dx-9-drivers/

Ah yes, starcraft II at 193FPS


I'm sure at the loading screen maybe, even modern top tier hardware chokes on that games engine in actual gameplay with the crazy amount of single threaded graphical effects

Solaris17This is the stance most people are taking but it’s the wrong one. Optimized doesn’t mean it didn’t work before.

Optimizing CS:GO so it will get the same 300 fps so you can try to brag to people on forums about how much it matters is what that games user base and market expect.

Now if you want to play neverwinter nights 1 are people going to bitch? No it works and plays just fine graphics hardware has come so far that even translation runs it fast enough.

I'm glad to hear that someone who actually has the cards is getting good use of it.

ScrizzI'm glad to hear that someone who actually has the cards is getting good use of it.

Thanks, its certainly not even close to the best or fastest card on the market, but its nice to have a third player. Its easy to bash the product in comparison to others obviously, but I think its work taking a look inward. If you compare ARC Alchemist drivers what they were, to what they are now it is a massive difference current problems aside.

Solaris17This is the stance most people are taking but it’s the wrong one. Optimized doesn’t mean it didn’t work before.

Optimizing CS:GO so it will get the same 300 fps so you can try to brag to people on forums about how much it matters is what that games user base and market expect.

Now if you want to play neverwinter nights 1 are people going to bitch? No it works and plays just fine graphics hardware has come so far that even translation runs it fast enough.

But that's not how it is in practice, there is more in DX9-11 life than CS GO and another bunch of stuff that runs on toasters.

There are STILL titles coming out that murder a large part of the GPUs and especially the performance level Arc has on offer for them. Nobody cares about 250 or 300 fps, it was never an argument to begin with for Intel. Not sure why you'd use it, to be honest.

Also, if you game on 4K, the perf requirement for DX11 titles also increases significantly. The simple fact is you just need full perf there or you're not competitive.

It would be another thing entirely if Intel's DX12 performance/base performance was so much higher that they could take the 'hit' on earlier APIs, but that's not the case.

Honestly, i'm a little impressed if they just used open source vulkan wrappers from the linux community
It's somewhere between ballsy stealing and smart and i cant decide which

Super Firm TofuApparently that's exactly what Intel's using in this latest driver.

www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/12/intel-using-dxvk-part-of-steam-proton-for-their-windows-arc-gpu-dx-9-drivers/

That links seems to be broken (maybe hug of death?) but if true would be better than direct optimization of cherry picked games. There was already an open source tool that listed and facilitated dxvk replacement on compatible titles, I'd be curious about how the new drivers perform compared to the old ones with dxvk replaced in the game

CrackongI don't see basic functions as "innovation".
Cut the crap Intel.

Intel has been bsing people since the Super 7 days.

Dirt ChipARK Alchemist as fine wine.
That`s a good one.
It really is.

Not old enough to be, it was rotten out the gate lol

btarunr… however, the GPU curiously lacks hardware support for DirectX 9.

I find it surprising that this misconception still prevails and that journalists don't see through Intel's BS excuses for not supporting DirectX 9.
If they can support DirectX 9 through a translation to DirectX 12, then they do have the underlying hardware features they need.
It should be basic knowledge that none of the current GPUs support either DirectX 12, OpenGL or Vulkan directly, it is the responsibility of the GPU driver to manage the API's state and translate operations into the GPU's native API. A GPU can support any API which can be translated into its hardware capabilities, which is why GPUs have no problem supporting API features released long after the GPU (e.g. Vulkan on Kepler).

btarunrWhile Arc GPUs lack DirectX 9 support, foolproof API translation technologies exist, which convert DirectX 9 API instructions into DirectX 12. This is not fundamentally unlike how 32-bit applications work on 64-bit Windows (using WOW64 machine-architecture translation).

This is not comparable at all. x86-64 is basically a superset of x86-32, and it doesn't involve emulating a complex state machine on top of another.

trsttteWhat hw support? That shtick came from MooreLawIsDead/wccftech,

Anyone surprised?
TPU should really check their sources better, even indirect sources. Sometimes people repeat false claims until others just assume them to be true, that may be the case here.

While my BS alarm goes off immediately when I hear people making such claims, others shouldn't have to know graphics programming to see through this. Anyone deep into tech show know that the driver's responsibility is to translate graphics APIs into the GPU's native API and manage the API's internal state.

I was also disappointed back when Intel had their "ARC apology tour", visiting major reviewers/content creators like LTT, GN and PCWorld, and they all failed to reveal Intel's marketing BS and excuses, not just for DirectX 9, but the obvious bogus claims like haven't had time to mature, and the nonsense that newer DirectX 12 games performed better on ARC (when the data actually showed otherwise). While these guys obviously spend thousands of hours benchmarking and overclocking, they could benefit a lot from learning more about how GPUs actually work and how games work. This would not only help them see through marketing BS and excuses from the makers, but also help determine what kind of issues they are observing, and obviously make better content for their viewers.

trsttteI'm not really into the hole architecture and instruction sets of GPUs but I'm pretty sure fixed hw blocks have nothing to do with DirectX9 implementation.

It's nearly two decades since GPUs were mostly fixed function. Programmable GPUs are backwards compatible in the sense that it's easy for the driver to implement the "fixed function features" through programmable shaders etc. And just simple logical deduction would make this obvious; OpenGL is still supported and have way more legacy features than DirectX 9.

trsttteTheir drivers suck and don't have years of experience implementing high performance Dx9 acceleration so they went the "throw the bucket at microsoft" route with translation - this and it's dis/advantages were already discussed pretty much ad nauseum.

They actually had support in their old driver, but apparently found it too much effort to rewrite it for the new GPU architecture.
But otherwise you pretty much nailed it; they just didn't want to spend the resources, and blame someone else when it inevitably fails.

No matter how much manure they spread on top of it, the underlying facts will remain; they are emulating one complex API on top of another very different and complex API, there will be a lot of glitches and slowdowns, and it will never be close to 100%. The best case to hope for would be something comparable to Wine in Linux.

efikkanand it will never be close to 100%.

This is the one place I somewhat disagree. I mean, dxvk is very fast. It was faster than AMDs native DX11 driver until recently.

slow and steady!! can win the race?

There is first rumours about Intel Arc market share in last days. Around 4% of discrete graphics if rumours is true? Not sure number by sold items or $$. Link will not post because maybe is clickbite twitt.