now this pretty dusty gaming PC is featured on the channel before it is my at-home gaming
system and for the last month it's had an Intel Arc GPU in it and in today's video we're going
to discuss if it was actually like living with a bipolar honey badger I.E not pleasant but before
not pleasant today's video sponsor today's video is sponsored by be quiet and their new FX series
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[Music] thank you
oh almost dropped that holy crap and as you can tell from the bits of dust sediment the graphics
God's been in here a while now before we get into the trials and tribulations of Intel GPU ownership
just a little bit of context so that you get where this video is coming from now this system
is used like 98 for gaming I do occasionally edit thumbnails and stuff on it but it's it's
a recreational system and for the month I didn't exhaustively test every use case imaginable I just
used the system for the things that I'd normally use it just with an Intel a770 in it as opposed
to the RTX 3080 that's normally in it games wise I primarily played Dota 2 which is about as easy
to run as from here to that door but over the last month I did play some other games on it as well I
tried some escape from tarkov on it I also did a bunch of stalker gamma which is a relatively
jankly modded version of an old video game and as you can tell from this footage I filmed on a
70s camcorder I found in a dumpster trying to run that on an arc GPU went about as terribly as you'd
expect but more on that later but other than that I also played some Borderlands on it uh the forest
I played recently on it as well some Ship Breaker and even some escape from tarkov which I may have
mentioned already and all of this gaming was done on a 34-inch Ultra wide display so quite a
chunky resolution for this GPU to drive and after spending a month paying you know various stuff on
it it was fine although I did have a couple of problems which I think we should discuss now
as of driver this obscene number I couldn't get screen capturing to reliably work on the Intel
Arc GPU which is pretty annoying considering that on both Nvidia and AMD gpus you just press
a button and it kind of happens now in terms of the screen capture maybe I'm too stupid to
figure it out and that's the problem which is likely but it's not like I'm trying to solve
M Theory with it so I feel like it shouldn't be that complicated if it requires an IQ test for me
to get screen capture working with the software it's not user friendly enough now under Studio
there's a whole capture Sub menu that lets you set all of the parameters of the capturing you
know the resolution frame rate Kodak filtrate all of that stuff but there's no place for you to set
a hotkey to start the capture which doesn't make any sense like you can press the start button here
and then like 50 of the time it actually does a screen capture but they can't expect me to alt
Tab out of the thing that I'm doing to press a button in the software alt tab back in finish
the thing that I wanted to record and then alt Tab out again to stop the thing that's just this
is just not acceptable now under app preferences there is a hotkey submenu that only lets you set
a hotkey for highlights not for screen capturing like it's such a weird problem they put all this
effort into a fancy capture facility and then forgot to put in a way for you to turn it on
like at a point I started just using random combinations of alt and other key hoping that
I just find a random combination that starts it but I couldn't I even Googled it and couldn't
find a combination for it but this is an older driver version and there has been an update in
the meantime so let's update the drivers and see if maybe that fixes it now I decided to purge
the old drivers with napalm in case there was some kind of latent setting issue before installing the
new fresh drivers but the new drivers didn't seem to change anything in terms of the screen capture
nope that didn't fix it either which I know is just going to lead to some super patronizing
comment down below about how obvious it is all you need to do is this easy 29 step process which
usually doesn't end up working anyway but then they'll keep going about how shocked they are
that somebody with a tech channel of my size can't figure it out but that's the point it's
screen capture it shouldn't require figuring out it should just work but anyway now that
my blood pressure is several PSI higher than before let's get into the second problem I had
[Music] now I want to preface all of this by saying that struggling to run stalker gamma
is a bit of a niche complaint because it's a very heavily modded version of a pretty janky
old game and sometimes its performance seems more dependent on lunar's cycle than the hardware that
it's running on even with the 3080 in the system the game's performance was sporadic but when I
dropped in the arc GPU it dropped from an average of about 100 frames per second down to sometimes
in the mid-20s if it was raining which is really not a great experience but then I remembered a
bunch of you mentioned to just use the dxvk fix to get better gaming performance with older games
and Intel Arc gpus which is a fix that I think has actually been natively added to the latest Intel
drivers but we'll try those out a little bit later but anyway before those drivers I just couldn't
get the community made dxvk fix working for stalker gamma because they're like source files
that you have to go and download off of GitHub and then because stalker gamma is like 300 mods over
multiple install locations it's very difficult to figure out where the dxvk source files need to go
to get them to work and then none of them worked and it ended up with me just eventually breaking
the game install and having to go through the very lengthy process to reinstall stalker gamma
and then I just rage quit on it and decided to live with the terrible gaming performance but what
about those drivers I just mentioned let's give those a try and see if they fix the performance
so I'm gonna do a quick Benchmark here in a very specific bit that I saved so that we can update
the drivers and see if it's actually helped with the performance now bear in mind this is
running a 1080p whereas I was gaming using 3440 by 1440p before as you can see resolution doesn't
really impact it much we're getting about the same frame rate that I was getting with
the the ultra wide and you can see the GPU isn't really doing anything so let's do some
benchmarking and then see if we can get more than 20 GPU utilization with the new driver [Music]
holy crap that is insane look at that frame rate and that GPU utilization as well that is a huge
difference the performance Improvement was so big in fact I thought it was a little bit fishy so I
went and reinstalled the older drivers but the performance Improvement remained and I've even
gone as far as turning resize bar off to see if has that made any difference but that this is
with the resize bar off and we're getting a much better performance so despite the fact that I ddu
wiped the newer drivers off to install the old ones on without being connected to the internet
it's still giving us the performance benefit what makes it even weirder is earlier today I
got the worst performance I've ever gotten from stalker gamma with the new drivers I
then just restarted the system and it fixed it I briefly thought maybe it had something
to do with the system needing to restart for Resolutions to apply but then when I set the
game to 4K it ran better than the initial terrible performance so I have no idea what
to make of these results and quite frankly I'm not even sure it's the arc gpu's fault
so I probably didn't need to include all of this in this video but it was like the
only interesting thing that happened over my time with The Arc gpus so I had to put it in
now I know up until this point the whole video has just been me complaining about
the arc GPU but those were two pretty minor Niche complaints although the screen capture really is
very broken rarely if ever does it actually capture any footage even if you manually
press the record button in the software like some kind of animal and the reason I brought those up
over the course of the video was because honestly most of the time I didn't even realize it was in
the system I just came home tried to play games on it and games just kind of happened but let's
face it games working on a graphics card is very much a minimum requirement so yeah I don't know
how much that information is worth to you um I think Linus is also doing one of these month-long
periods with with this graphics card and I'm sure he'll have a lot more varied tests and
stuff with his graphics card but for like pretty basic gaming it meant the minimum requirement
of mostly working so yes thank you for watching and until the next video bye-bye foreign [Music]
[Music]