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Processor | AMD Ryzen 9 5900X ||| Intel Core i7-3930K |
---|---|
Motherboard | ASUS ProArt B550-CREATOR ||| Asus P9X79 WS |
Cooling | Noctua NH-U14S ||| Be Quiet Pure Rock |
Memory | Crucial 2 x 16 GB 3200 MHz ||| Corsair 8 x 8 GB 1333 MHz |
Video Card(s) | MSI GTX 1060 3GB ||| MSI GTX 680 4GB |
Storage | Samsung 970 PRO 512 GB + 1 TB ||| Intel 545s 512 GB + 256 GB |
Display(s) | Asus ROG Swift PG278QR 27" ||| Eizo EV2416W 24" |
Case | Fractal Design Define 7 XL x 2 |
Audio Device(s) | Cambridge Audio DacMagic Plus |
Power Supply | Seasonic Focus PX-850 x 2 |
Mouse | Razer Abyssus |
Keyboard | CM Storm QuickFire XT |
Software | Ubuntu |
Well, it's not necessarily wrong to think like performance only matters for the latest titles, and the rest are fine as long as they reach a decent performance level (e.g. 120 FPS, good consistency). But thinking that ignoring anything but DirectX 12 titles is going to paint a different picture, then you're mistaken. Let's go down the rabbit hole…I think targeting DX12 and RT is normal - that's where we need more performance. DX11 and older games already run well enough on basically anything (except for a couple titles on Arc).
I want Intel to succeed myself, and I really want to buy an A770 to play with it, but a couple of things hold me back:
1. Drivers.
At 1440p, if you only account for DirectX 12 titles, RTX 3060 Ti is still 13% faster than A770 (compared to 17% with all games), similarly RTX 3060 goes from being 10% slower to 14% slower with only DirectX 12 titles. So barely a significant difference, not enough to bump it up a performance tier or two. If you look closely, there are very few games where A770 can beat RTX 3060 Ti, if anything the few times it does seems more like statistical outliers than anything. What's even more concerning if you study the numbers is that the performance characteristics in DirectX 12 games vary a lot more than DirectX 11 games, which makes sense as the quality of the game code affects the performance the more control the game has. If you remember the article about Intel's official performance figures for A770, their DirectX 12 results showcased a much "better" results vs. RTX 3060 Ti, but as I pointed out in that thread, they used a lot of obscure Unreal titles which made up a large portion of the "favorable" games, so in no doubt they had cherry-picked games to make A770 look like it's better for DirectX 12 games and "future" games.
There is an interesting historical parallel; The Radeon 200/300 series was supposed to be better than Nvidia based on a few cherry-picked games, e.g. AotS. Even back then I pointed out these to be statistical outliers, but people claimed these counted more, as they somehow represented future games. This myth lived on with 400/500 series and Vega, along with the magical driver optimizations which never arrived.
So in conclusion, there is no technical or statistical basis to claim that ARC Alchemist is going to be viewed more favorable as DirectX 12 games become more dominant, and it's extremely unlikely that future games is going to bump it up a performance tier or two. Remember that based on the specs of this chip we should expect it to perform in the RTX 3080 range, but it doesn't come close to this, not from lacking drivers or faulty games, but from terribly performing hardware. No amount of driver tinkering and new games is going to paint a very different picture. And lastly don't forget that A770 only managed to hit >120 FPS in one of the DirectX 12 games, and assuming future games will be more demanding, A770 is not even going to be regarded as a 1440p card any more.