Welcome back folks as I continue my Odyssey with Arc. In this series I continue to test
Intel drivers and monitor gaming performance every month using a reference A770. Another
month has gone by and a significant driver drop has occurred, you’ll definitely want to
see the results of this month's check in, so without further ado, let's get to it.
Early in December, the Intel Graphics Team dropped a MASSIVE driver. In terms of actual
download size the driver is still about 1.3GB like the previous ones,
but it’s the performance claims that make it massive. Intel promised enormous performance
boosts in older APIs, specifically DX9, which is used by popular games like Counter Strike
Global Offensive. Performance for CS:GO was horrible at launch so I obviously wanted to
include that title in my testing this time, and even went back and pulled previous drivers to
validate. Before we get to the results though, let’s recap the testing setup.
All tests done on the Arc A770 Limited Edition were performed on my X570 test bench with a Ryzen
9 5900X at the helm and Resizable BAR engaged. 32GB of DDR4 3600MHz DRAM rounds out the core
of the system, and all the games are played from a PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD. Remember, most of the ‘launch’
numbers are provided by Brad’s initial review on PCWorld.com using an almost identical system, but
I will continue to add more games of my own over time. I have also taken audience feedback and am
including the 1% low metrics where I can to ensure a more granular look at performance differentials,
so thanks for those notes and I’m happy to include it. If there are any other stats you’d like to
see please let me know in the comments below, and while you are down there don’t forget to subscribe
and smash the crap out of that bell to see next month's results! Now onto the testing results.
Starting at the top of our list we have Cyberpunk 2077 aaaand,
nothing. The FPS needle really didn’t move here and performance was mostly flat at both 1080p and
1440p. For what it’s worth, performance has been trending up since the launch,
but we’ll need more data points to show if it’s outside of the margin of error.
Watch Dogs Legion was a culprit of slightly reduced performance
in the post-launch driver but here at 1080p we see things coming back up,
though not by much. At 1440p we still see flat results, but again at least it’s
consistent and plays much smoother than the launch driver for what that’s worth to you.
Horizon Zero Dawn was a game that saw healthy improvements with the
first-month driver updates and at 1080p we see a slight uptick in that number again,
but the 1% lows remained the same. It’s much the same story at 1440p where the
average frame rate slightly improved but the 1% lows stayed about the same.
Borderlands 3 was a boring one to talk about last month and that story stays the same this month,
with both 1080p and 1440p results remaining basically flat. Not a
whole lot to write home about once again, but I’ll keep tracking it.
Total War Troy running on DX11 showed the most impressive gains last month
but this time around both 1080p and 1440p saw no movement. But you know what, the performance
is still very good and I’ll take it because it’s still miles beyond where it started.
Remember last month when I said Shadow of the Tomb Raider was most likely tapped out
in performance and updates? Well, if this running streak of completely flat results
at 1080p isn’t proof enough then maybe seeing the exact same numbers again at 1440p might convince
you. But seriously, performance is solid here even if it’s a boring story to track.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is a title that I was hoping to see some improvements
on due to its massive popularity, but at 1080p we see ever so slight movement of the
1% lows but it’s too close to really get excited about. And at 1440p it’s
a rinse-and-repeat kind of scenario, but could prove a good case for XeSS
to step in and do some magic to get us up over 60, so maybe I’ll look at that soon.
Assassins Creed Valhalla pretty much shares the same fate as
Modern Warfare 2 with flat results, but hey, don’t shoot the messenger.
So far in the DX12 games I’be been tracking we’ve kinda hit a leveling-off point,
though I still hope to see some more improvements in Cyberpunk 2077 and
Modern Warfare 2 as those titles still have quite a bit of life left in them. But I did
add testing for two of the MOST played titles on Steam that weren’t DX12 based,
both of which didn’t perform so well at the launch of the A770, so let’s see how those are doing.
I’m going to start off with Counter Strike Global Offensive,
or CS:GO as it’s more often referred to. This was a title Intel was boasting about recently,
so I needed to go back and take a look at it with launch drivers, and holy crap was it bad. The game
was an absolute stutter fest and just flat-out unplayable in that state. Even the second driver
didn’t do anything to alleviate it. But once this new driver hit that Intel was excited about, wow.
All I have to say is wow. The gains were real, the smoothness is real. What a shame this wasn’t what
Intel delivered at launch because knowing there could have been double the average frame rate
performance at 1080p and well over double the 1% low performance would have really gone a long way.
Even at 1440p, there were insane gains to be had, just under 2x, but who’s counting right? It looks
like Intel’s claims seemed to have panned out in this game in particular, so keep it up team!
Another game consistently at the top of the Steam charts is Grand Theft Auto V. This game runs on
DX10, and might be old as the hills at this point but still, it’s a massive game that isn’t slowing
down anytime soon. So what about performance in this title? The 1080p results were quite telling,
especially in the 1% low department where the game is now approaching the initial average frame rate.
At 1440p the story isn’t quite as shocking thanks to overhead reduction at the higher resolution,
but a modest increase nonetheless. It is wild to think that performance can improve so drastically
in the course of a couple of months, so once again, keep the updates coming, team!
Before I wrap it up, one of the things folks asked about in the video last month was for me to look
at driver stability over the course of this series. For the most part, I didn’t experience
any wild issues with the second major driver. When I went back and spent time with the launch
driver I found a TON of weird glitches, and even had the screen black out randomly when using HDMI.
The biggest issue I ran into with the November update was the screen getting
hung when changing resolutions, prompting a reboot to sort it out. The latest driver,
however, hasn’t given me any of those issues at all like the older drivers did. Is that
to say it’s error-free? Not at all. Just because I haven’t experienced it doesn’t
mean others haven’t, so certainly share your experience if you’re using an Arc graphics card.
But I will continue to note any other stability issues I encounter month to month.
Well, so far we’ve seen some interesting performance improvements from Arc’s launch
to today, alongside some nothingburgers as well. In the “Favorite Hardware of 2022” episode of The
Full Nerd, Brad and I both agreed that it felt like the A700 Series needed a bit more time in
the oven, and it’s starting to show. But where do I go from here? Do I keep going down the same path
and hope to see some improvements or do I start looking into other aspects of the Arc line, such
as ray tracing, XeSS, and maybe encoding? Maybe I shift to those things for the coming months
and revisit at the 6 months and then one-year mark. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
And whatever road this odyssey takes us down, make sure you’ve hit that like
button and subscribe here on PCWorld for even more PC Gaming and Hardware Goodness.