One thing I'm looking forward to revisiting with Battlemage is Intel's "smoothsync" which is effectively vsync off, but with a very basic blend at the tear line between two frames.

This initially looked like a great zero-lag feature when I took a look at Arc A770 18 months ago, but the feature was plagued with flickering and generally didn't work as advertised - like many of the new features introduced in the rather terrible Arc Control Panel. I've heard that the situation is much improved now, but I bought a 16GB A770 on a whim to play with and it was a bit of a disaster for both game and application behaviour so I sold it off and can't reassess the driver situation with late 2024 drivers.

Chrispy_generally didn't work as advertised - like many of the new features introduced in the rather terrible Arc Control Panel.

Sounds a lot like the dreaded late 2022 drivers or the very-early 2023 drivers. No wonder that in 2022, people were spreading fake news about Arc being dead right after being launched!

Now with what some people suspect was a termination-in-disguise of Pat Gelsinger, there is a higher chance of Arc unexpectedly getting cancelled!

I don't even know if Battlemage will be better than a lower model of Alchemist or not! For all I know, it might not be any better than the A750! We need benchmarks, fast!

I hope that they didn't make a critical mistake, like something I would expect in '21 or very-early '22!

A bunch of people could very well be regretting that they didn't hold on to their Alchemist cards!

RJARRRPCGPSounds a lot like the dreaded late 2022 drivers or the very-early 2023 drivers. No wonder that in 2022, people were spreading fake news about Arc being dead right after being launched!

Now with what some people suspect was a termination-in-disguise of Pat Gelsinger, there is a higher chance of Arc unexpectedly getting cancelled!

I don't even know if Battlemage will be better than a lower model of Alchemist or not! For all I know, it might not be any better than the A750! We need benchmarks, fast!

It sure wasn't recommended by any of the review channels at launch, they all said "only buy if you're willing to put up with all these issues <insert huge list of DX9 performance issues, ReBAR issues on some boards, game glitch issues, games that refuse to even launch, driver features being broken, the control panel doing the opposite of what it was set to>"

I think sites and channels that re-visited the A770 six months after launch were all pretty positive, saying that the majority of the problems were resolved, but that DX9 was still abysmal because it was being emulated rather than supported in hardware, and several 2023 AAA titles needed driver updates to work, with those game-ready driver updates taking several weeks to arrive, rather than the day or two for Nvidia and AMD. That's roughly when I sold my sample on, because I could see the potential but Arc wasn't usable enough for me to put into systems that Average Joe would be using - I felt that you still needed to be a technically-competent enthusiast at that point with the patience to wait longer for game fixes in driver releasesthan team red or team green, and the willingness to mess around with .ini files, .cfg files, and launching games with additional command-line switches as workarounds.

As of some point in late 2023 I think, the DX9 issue was fixed by using a Vulkan translator instead of emulating, and as I understand it, the number of game launches with serious issues on Arc at launch is much smaller. Starfield was the last high-profile screwup I think with Arc owners not even able to launch the game for 3 weeks or so.

When I first tested my Arc A770, I could play Halo Custom Edition (DirectX 9) without much, if any problems.

RJARRRPCGPWhen I first tested my Arc A770, I could play Halo Custom Edition (DirectX 9) without much, if any problems.

Honestly a lot of DX9 stuff didn't really matter. It was running much slower than expected, but many of those DX9 games were so old and so easy to run that even in their emulated state with vastly-reduced performance, I was still seeing >60fps most or all of the time.

I think all of the DX9 stuff worked properly, just running at about 30-40% of the framerate I'd have expected from a $350 GPU in 2023. I don't recall seeing any artifacts or glitches in games.

theyre naming/model heirarchy is confusing. I cant understand the level based on the model. very easy with amd/nvisia. and as much as I dislike intel practices, I really hope they can go head to head with nvidia in time if amd doesnt want to. I would buy an intel card if they were competitive but it needs time to cook. I dont buy new gen of anything. 3 in the market and only 1 is leading. productivity and RT is lacking with the other 2