Intel Confirms Arc A750 Price Cut, Claims Big Performance Gains as Drivers Mature

[btarunr]

Intel confirmed the price-cut for its Arc "Alchemist" A750 performance-segment graphics card that we earlier reported. The company also gave us a quick heads-up of just how far along the Arc 7-series graphics cards have matured in performance and features, over the months of driver updates. In particular, the company focused on how performance of the A750 is about 43% higher than it was at launch in DirectX 9 titles—an API the Xe-HPG graphics architecture doesn't natively support.

Intel relies on a combination of D3D9 to D3D12 API translation, and game-specific optimization at the driver-level, to play DirectX 9 games. The company has been optimizing popular DirectX 9 titles over the past several months, and put out performance gains in a new presentation. Since launch, Intel has added XeSS support to over 35 games, and promises to expand the list. With its starting price now at $249, one can expect custom-design boards, such as the ASRock A750 Challenger OC and the GUNNIR A750 Photon, to be priced at or under $300, although the reference-design Intel A750 Limited Edition cards can be found in some places. Intel also announced that it is bundling "Nightingale," and "The Settlers: New Allies" with pre-built desktops that combine 12th Gen or 13th Gen Core desktop processors and Arc A750 graphics cards.



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[RJARRRPCGP]

Good news, despite DirectX9 not being natively supported, which is bad news for Gearbox Halo CE lovers!

 

[chrcoluk]

Worth saying that the DX9 performance bump is only in select titles? The reality will be that less popular titles wont get he same treatment.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

Worth saying that the DX9 performance bump is only in select titles? The reality will be that less popular titles wont get he same treatment.

Halo 1x was a popular DirectX9 title. It's still alive today!

 

[Tsukiyomi91]

price cut for an underperforming GPU that's not even sold in some places.

 

[qlum]

Intel relies on a combination of D3D9 to D3D12 API translation, and game-specific optimization at the driver-level, to play DirectX 9 games.

Didn't they use dxvk, thus translating to vulkan not dx12?

 

[JAB Creations]

Worth saying that the DX9 performance bump is only in select titles? The reality will be that less popular titles wont get he same treatment.

Do you write software? Drivers? Drivers specific to these cards?

When I work on my software all of my clients get updates on the core system even if only one is paying for something new. It is very possible to implement certain things that make improvements for many other games not explicitly tested. Sure, other games won't get as much or even any explicit treatment though when was the last time AMD or Nvidia did driver optimization for DirectX 9 games? Plus, at some point you're going to need to upgrade any way. Just a lot of pointless negativity from your post.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Do you write software? Drivers? Drivers specific to these cards?

Do you?

When I work on my software all of my clients get updates on the core system even if only one is paying for something new. It is very possible to implement certain things that make improvements for many other games not explicitly tested.

It's also possible to cause performance regression in other areas when fixes are implemented. This is known to happen in GPU drivers, and has happened before.

Sure, other games won't get as much or even any explicit treatment though when was the last time AMD or Nvidia did driver optimization for DirectX 9 games?

Whataboutism. AMD and nvidia optimized for DX9 when DX9 was still widely used in new games. They have long had native implementation. Intel did not.

Plus, at some point you're going to need to upgrade any way.

You cant just upgrade the DX implementation of games. WTF even is this argument?

Just a lot of pointless negativity from your post.

He's totally justified in pointing out that one game being optimized does not mean others will improve. Not sure why you're being so defensive of intel here.....

 

[BSim500]

Do you write software? Drivers? Drivers specific to these cards? When I work on my software all of my clients get updates on the core system even if only one is paying for something new. It is very possible to implement certain things that make improvements for many other games not explicitly tested. Sure, other games won't get as much or even any explicit treatment though when was the last time AMD or Nvidia did driver optimization for DirectX 9 games? Plus, at some point you're going to need to upgrade any way. Just a lot of pointless negativity from your post.

Shooting the messenger is helping no-one. This isn't just a case where games run faster on AMD / nVidia due to inheriting pre-existing optimisations written in AMD / nVidia drivers years ago when older DX9 games came out. The bigger problem is that Intel are unique in deliberately ripping out DirectX9 hardware support and now have to emulate it via API wrappers which comes with a huge performance hit. nVidia and AMD both have DX9 native hardware support *on top* of whatever optimisations they made, don't have matching performance penalties nor need to hand tweak everything to compensate. Per-game optimisation merely tries to hide some of that gap rather than solve the underlying problem. AMD & nVidia haven't put out per-game optimisations for DX9 titles recently because they don't need to as native hardware support runs them 'properly' as they were designed to.

chrcoluk is right in asking the same question many of us who prefer older games have : "it's great to see that Intel doubled the FPS in 13x hand-tweaked DX9 games but how many more of the literal thousands of games on this list won't get the same special treatment?" (ie, will run either a lot slower or even have compatibility problems due to issues that often occur with wrappers, but will also fly under the radar of tech sites to bother testing anything outside "the bubble" of the usual 15-30 mostly DX11-12 games plus the odd 1-2x DX9 cherry-picked "showcase" titles like CS:GO. Seeing the gargantuan disparity between this and this is exactly why a whole lot more testing is needed outside of a handful of cherry picked hand-optimised titles.

 

[mama]

Certainly needed to be lower a long time ago. I think people have just moved on now.

 

[pavle]

That's quite a nice card but drivers won't mature by themselves and intel should really not make performance dependent on resizable_BAR and directx_12.

 

[LabRat 891]

Certainly needed to be lower a long time ago. I think people have just moved on now.

I like keeping an eye on Intel's dGPU news. I'm waiting for them to release their nex-gen and early-EoL this gen right after liquidating them. -Hoping to pick up one or two examples as collector's pieces, dirt cheap.

 

[awesomesauce]

Soooo no gen2 rumours?

is this already the end for arc gpu?

 

[JAB Creations]

Do you?

I've developed an entire platform entirely from scratch, so yes.

Whataboutism. AMD and nvidia optimized for DX9 when DX9 was still widely used in new games. They have long had native implementation. Intel did not.

Right, so Intel should test thousands of games blindly or should they make an effort with the more popular titles so more people get a positive effect or should they track down random people on forums - because, it's not like people on the Internet make demands for things they don't actually care about.

You cant just upgrade the DX implementation of games. WTF even is this argument?

Upgrade your card; way to make a really bad presumption.

He's totally justified in pointing out that one game being optimized does not mean others will improve. Not sure why you're being so defensive of intel here.....

I don't like Intel, in fact I think they're probably one of the worst corporations. That being said competition is a good thing. Most people have weak psychology grasp on topics, like making really poor presumptions. Nvidia and Intel are problematic because most people don't think critically. "Nvidia has the fastest $180,000 video card! So I'll buy their $300 card even though AMD gives 40% more performance for 27% less money!" would be a great example. If everyone talks negative about positive things, those positive things won't continue past a point. Would I recommend an Intel GPU? No, though as a developer I try to be supportive of other developers, even if they're working for a corporation like Intel or Nvidia. The 16GB A770 is going for $350 on Newegg right now, my RX 6800 cost me still above MSRP and GPU RAM is at a premium and can't be upgraded without outright replacing a card. Intel is providing options for people even if their products are too immature to recommend while completely ignoring Intel's corporate behavior. I'm always happy to go against what most people say because there are others who also use their brains instead of just pointlessly repeating what everyone else has said.

 

[Hyderz]

popular dx9 titles will get priority, for the other dx9 titles i think it will slowly get patched as time goes on.
looking foward to seeing more intel gpus in the future..

 

[InVasMani]

That Skyrim uplift is steep I wonder if that had been particularly sub-par prior and they simply put a lot of effort into optimizing it. The DX9 is basically Chimera technology rendering translation to their other GPU hardware right? It doesn't actually have DX9 hardware correct?

 

[eidairaman1]

More raja promises?

 

[chrcoluk]

Do you write software? Drivers? Drivers specific to these cards?

When I work on my software all of my clients get updates on the core system even if only one is paying for something new. It is very possible to implement certain things that make improvements for many other games not explicitly tested. Sure, other games won't get as much or even any explicit treatment though when was the last time AMD or Nvidia did driver optimization for DirectX 9 games? Plus, at some point you're going to need to upgrade any way. Just a lot of pointless negativity from your post.

Its possible but Intel themselves have stated they doing optimizations on a game by game basis.

 

[Vayra86]

I've developed an entire platform entirely from scratch, so yes.

Right, so Intel should test thousands of games blindly or should they make an effort with the more popular titles so more people get a positive effect or should they track down random people on forums - because, it's not like people on the Internet make demands for things they don't actually care about.

Upgrade your card; way to make a really bad presumption.

I don't like Intel, in fact I think they're probably one of the worst corporations. That being said competition is a good thing. Most people have weak psychology grasp on topics, like making really poor presumptions. Nvidia and Intel are problematic because most people don't think critically. "Nvidia has the fastest $180,000 video card! So I'll buy their $300 card even though AMD gives 40% more performance for 27% less money!" would be a great example. If everyone talks negative about positive things, those positive things won't continue past a point. Would I recommend an Intel GPU? No, though as a developer I try to be supportive of other developers, even if they're working for a corporation like Intel or Nvidia. The 16GB A770 is going for $350 on Newegg right now, my RX 6800 cost me still above MSRP and GPU RAM is at a premium and can't be upgraded without outright replacing a card. Intel is providing options for people even if their products are too immature to recommend while completely ignoring Intel's corporate behavior. I'm always happy to go against what most people say because there are others who also use their brains instead of just pointlessly repeating what everyone else has said.

Good points but that still makes the question of how well other pre-DX12 titles run a very fundamental one, that ties in with choices Intel made in the course of developing ARC. They've taken their sweet time, initially applying an IGP approach to drivers and performance scaling, and failed miserably in doing so. These are clear project management failures (Hi Raja!). They scoped the whole project wrong and then reality struck.

Intel brutally misfired and they're now fixing it. Fixing is good. But its a fix. And to be honest, it feels more like salvaging what's left because the clock keeps ticking and new cards get released. Not a fantastic approach that promises Intel becomes a serious competitor in the gaming space. Yes, they sell a completely failed GPU with meagre stability for 350. So now they're excused? It really depends on your perspective here - your nearly naive optimism is just one of them. Because lets face it: if Intel reaches perf parity they will reach price parity too. Stop fooling yourself and trying to fool others. This is a simple case of you get what you pay for. The card costs 350 because it doesn't compare to a card still costing 500+ today.

Your story wrt Intel now is the same narrative we heard and read for decades regarding ATI/AMD. Oh the poor underdog... Look at what that dog's doing today with half successful product lines. They're following Nvidia in pricing, while launching products with less features and more launch issues. In CPU, they're leading not only in perf, but also in price; Intel is budget king on a large part of the stack now. Meanwhile, market share is at an all time low. Could you elaborate on the logic there and how vouching for the underdog has helped us? No amount of r/AMD noise or fanboy posts on a forum has had any traction on whether or not AMD waited a good 10 years before releasing Zen. That's just their business strategy, nothing else, combined with a design win. None of that originates from 'customer fanbase'.

 

[TumbleGeorge]

Just assume Dx9 died and you didn't realize it yet.

 

[AusWolf]

Awesome! Now where are the cards?

 

[TumbleGeorge]

was

The past tense is clear written.

 

[Vayra86]

The past tense is clear written.

Backwards compatibility is key to the PC platform, past tense or not.

Look at Windows. The very moment it wants to axe old stuff, the community destroys the idea. The same thing applied here - Intel completely misfired, even if it made every sort of business sense to emulate older APIs. Even Windows has these moves though (phasing out or emulating things), but only when the performance and stability are identical or better. Think of Dosbox.

Problem with gaming is and always will be that its a realtime application, every ms counts. Its part of the reason why it takes so long to get good perf out of a PS3 emulator as well. Even if you throw lots more hardware oomph against it, you'll still find some problems and inconsistencies that can kill the experience.

 

[TumbleGeorge]

Backwards compatibility is key to the PC platform, past tense or not.

Yes up to time.
Somewhere in the past behind Dx9 are even older versions that no one even mentions or requires to be supported anymore.

 

[AusWolf]

Yes up to time.
Somewhere in the past behind Dx9 are even older versions that no one even mentions or requires to be supported anymore.

I do. Long live GOG!