- Who in their right mind
would choose anything
but the best possible solution for the money?
I've never been able to figure it out.
But then,
against my deepest instincts,
that is exactly what I did.
- And me.
- [Linus] for 30 days
we have both been running Intel Arc GPUs
in our primary gaming rigs,
dealing with everything from
annoying software
to low performance drivers
to broken functionality.
I haven't been able
to play "Minecraft Dungeons"
with my kids in a month.
- [Luke] Yikes.
- But then,
I don't know what,
maybe halfway through?
- About halfway, I think.
Yeah, yeah.
- Something happened.
I stopped doing the Arc challenge,
and I started just using my computer.
- Yeah. I kind of just forgot about it.
- I still have some bones to pick
with Intel's GPU team.
To be very clear.
But like that urgent feeling I had
to just like rip it out of my computer.
Well, it's been replaced with like-
I'm going to do it still,
but, I'll get around to it. - Get around to it eventually.
Right?
Most of the problems I was having
were more related to
potentially the applications or games
that just have problems all the time.
Like we play "Star Citizen."
- [Linus] Yeah, well, like-
- [Luke] And sure, there was problems,
but it was "Star Citizen."
I played "Tarkov."
Same deal.
Not many of the issues
were clearly attributable
to just the Arc GPU itself.
- And we're obviously not the only ones.
The A770 has 4.3 eggs out of 5
on Newegg,
and just shy of 4 stars on Amazon.
For a product we wrote off,
then rooted for,
then completely wrote off.
That's kind of outstanding.
- Pretty good.
Like our sponsor.
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(upbeat music)
For the conspiracy theorists out there.
No, this challenge
was not sponsored by Intel,
and what better way to prove it
than to open with all the things that went wrong.
- A lot of things went wrong.
- First up, is my issues with VR.
I did eventually get it working,
thanks to a closed alpha driver from Intel.
But to say that it's not ideal
would be an understatement.
I can mostly play stationary games
like "Beat Saber,"
but anything even marginally more demanding,
especially with movement,
is a big problem.
I can only play the virtual reality
"Rick and Morty" game
for about 20 minutes at a time,
for example,
before succumbing to nausea.
So, just like in our last challenge,
VR was essentially a no-go for me.
And even worse,
that marginal VR experience
cost me basic functionality
on the same PC here in the rec room
that my kids use for couch gaming.
So I was woken up early
on more than one Saturday
because the TV won't turn on,
which seems to be some kind of
display wake bug in the alpha driver.
I won't hold that against them, though,
not when there are plenty of inconveniences
in the public drivers
that I can hold against them.
Like, what is this?
Why do I have to look at this
"limited display port functionality" message
every time my PC wakes from sleep?
The worst part,
is there's no limited functionality!
It's working fine!
I don't know for sure
if it's actually caused by Arc,
but I've never seen this message before.
So...
- Have you received a notification from it
that you have wanted to see?
- No, I can't say that I have.
- Yikes.
Yeah, I ran into things like that a lot.
System crashes with no event viewer logs,
weird graphical issues,
mostly with reflections
in various games,
really spiky lag,
and, I don't know-
- I saw that in "Halo: Infinite."
- Yeah, it's in a range of different games,
but not all of them,
which is weird.
I can't say for sure
that any of this was actually caused by Arc,
but I've never really seen
anything like it before.
And full disclosure,
I already pulled out my A770
for the "Tarkov" wipe.
I tried at the beginning of the wipe,
and it was horrible.
And okay,
it was over a month and a half.
So the fact that we're filming this now
and it's already out is fine.
- All right.
- But I installed it at the beginning of the wipe,
it was terrible.
- Okay.
- I installed my previous card,
still terrible.
- Oh.
- But not quite as terrible.
- I see.
- But that's probably a gap in price and yada yada yada.
- The truth is,
I actually pulled one already too.
But for good reason.
I mean the kids couldn't play
"It Takes Two"
on the rec room PC
because of the blank display issue.
And it was at like, 29 days, anyway.
A couple of other lingering issues, though,
with my setup
are to do with black levels
and cable compatibility.
- Cable compatibility?
- This one is bizarre.
Active cables like fiber optic,
HDMI or display port cables
just outright do not seem to work on Arc.
It's fine to run a standard cable
into a Thunderbolt card,
then run optical Thunderbolt to a dock,
then plug a standard cable
from the dock into the monitor.
But I couldn't run
any long-run cables like these ones
straight out of the back of the A770
to a display
without getting a garbled image,
or, most of the time,
no image at all.
It makes no sense to me
because I would think that a cable
with its own built-in signal repeater
would, you know,
be even less susceptible
to low signal strength on the video output,
which is usually the issue in these cases.
But I didn't imagine this.
Intel seems to have been able
to reproduce my issue on their end,
and are apparently working on a fix.
Oh.
Those run all the in-ceiling speakers.
That will be a video.
Get subscribed.
Don't look.
Look at lttstore.com
where we have amazing hoodies
like the Swacket and WAN hoodie.
Here's another bizarre one.
Check out the black levels on this display.
I messaged them about this a while back.
I think this started
when I first connected my projector
to the secondary output of the card,
through a Thunderbolt hub
and optical Thunderbolt cable of course.
But I've since disconnected that,
and updated my drivers,
and it doesn't seem to have improved.
Now, there would be nothing abnormal about this
if I was on an LCD display.
But this is an OLED,
this is a black background,
and it is distinctly gray.
Now, I think I have a theory.
Actually I have a couple of theories.
First of all, watch this.
When I switch it over to HDR,
the problem goes away.
It's now black.
If I plug into my wife's computer
running an NVIDIA card,
well, it doesn't matter
if it's SDR or HDR,
it works fine.
So I think it's something to do
with SDR video
and the full versus limited
RGB range values.
But I don't see any obvious way
to change that
in the Arc control software.
- Which software?
- Okay. Yeah.
That is definitely another ongoing problem.
- I talked about that plenty
in part one, or 1.5,
or whatever it was.
But that doesn't mean
I'm going to stop now.
Intel's approach to GPU software
literally makes no sense to me at all.
If you already have a desktop GPU control app-
- And you do!
- Yeah.
For the onboard graphics,
why do you need Arc control?
Another app,
and I hesitate to even call it that
'cause it's an overlay,
that also does almost nothing.
Even the built-in driver updater
doesn't really like work.
I didn't get notifications for new drivers.
And when I set it to update automatically-
- I did the same thing!
- It didn't work. - I did the same thing.
I set it to update automatically
on Sundays at 2:00 AM,
I came back two weeks after
an update had dropped,
and there was no update.
And then when I went to manually update,
I had to click it three times
to get it to start doing anything.
And then it had no
progress indicator whatsoever.
So we were actually
gaming together at the time.
Luke and my son are both waiting for me
while I'm sitting here going,
"Look, we're about to play "CS:GO,"
I need this driver update,
And I have no idea
how long it's gonna take." - I ended up getting it
through the Intel driver updater,
not even Arc control
because it just didn't work.
- Which is so frustrating
because the driver updates that landed
while we were doing the challenge
were actually really impressive.
- Yes.
Arc GPUs, ironically,
really struggle in older games.
And this is for a number of reasons.
Architecturally,
they were designed for newer APIs.
DX12, Vulkan in particular.
And on the software side,
Intel's Arc team
hasn't spent the last 20 years
coming up through those generations of games.
So there's a lot of holes.
DX9, in particular,
is not supported in hardware at all
on Arc Alchemist,
and Intel's shifted strategy last summer
to rely on emulation to support these games.
Which has led
to some kind of embarrassing results.
- But we got to see a lot of that change
right before our eyes.
They pulled off double,
almost triple digit performance improvements
right smack in the middle of the challenge,
taking some key problem games
from embarrassing to acceptable
pretty much overnight.
And the way that they did it is really cool.
DXVK was originally developed
for porting native-Windows games to Linux.
It is not emulation,
but rather a translation layer
that takes DirectX API calls
and converts them
to an equivalent Vulkan API call.
It's a key component
of the proton compatibility tool
that powers the Valve Steam Deck.
- And the thing is,
while it was designed for Linux,
nothing prevents you from using it on,
say, Windows.
- [Linus] I mean the first proof of concept
that I saw on this
was done manually by an end user.
The difference is that now
Intel is taking that
and baking it right into their drivers.
But that isn't to say
that they're suddenly perfect.
Here's some footage
of a "CS:GO" gaming session,
with Luke,
running on the DXVK driver.
See, I wasn't lying.
These are bad.
And that's one of the games
that was specifically called out
as "improved" by Intel.
And, this is another yikes,
aside from performance stutters,
I also got a completely black screen
when I was trying to access the menu,
which is why I couldn't change teams
for a while there.
I wouldn't describe these dips in performance
as constant,
and when they weren't happening
it was performing really well,
but they were definitely regular.
- The weird thing is
I just thought he was bad,
'cause mine was running fine.
The frustrating thing about it's failings
is that when Arc does well,
it does really well.
I was sure when we fired up "Star Citizen"
it just wasn't gonna work.
We're gonna be watching a slide show-
- I thought it was gonna be an absolute crap show.
- Terrible. Right?
But it was actually fine.
It was just a less powerful GPU
than what I had before.
But it was no problem.
- At least no more of a problem
than anything is in "Star Citizen."
- Fair enough.
- And, I saw the same in "Halo: Infinite."
Aside from just being
less powerful than my 3090,
it was fine...
Once I adjusted my expectations.
And turned off reflections.
- [Luke] Yeah.
I'm not sure it's reflections specifically,
but I had some pretty bad problems.
I can only really describe it
as "purple lights." - [Linus] I had no idea
what you were talking about
until finally I saw it at the end
of the "Star Citizen" session.
- Okay. Yeah.
That's actually helpful.
It's really weird.
Turning reflections down
or even off in some situations
can tend to resolve them
pretty much across the board.
But I basically just did that
and then completely forgot about it
because some level of reflection
would still work.
- It was kind of a wake up call actually for me,
doing this challenge.
Like when we review a new GPU,
we are so laser focused
on new rendering features
like ray tracing,
or who provides the utmost in image quality
with all the details cranked or whatever,
who has 3% more FPS?
But in the real world,
when I'm sitting in a dark room,
hanging out with the boys,
clicking heads,
those little details don't matter.
All I really care about is,
is the frame delivery smooth enough?
Which is probably why Arc
is ending up with these 4 star reviews.
I mean, obsessive enthusiasts
are gonna compare and contrast
with the best that Nvidia and AMD have to offer,
and they're gonna find it sorely lacking.
- Yeah. Not really gonna work out that great.
- But, I mean, think about it.
It wasn't that long ago for me
that turning off "that setting"
that just like doesn't work
was just a fact of life,
and I didn't worry about it.
What's the difference here?
- Well, the difference is that
we're talking about spending
your own hard-earned money
versus using whatever your parents
have to bring home from Best Buy.
This is a product that you chose.
- [Linus] True.
- And there are experiential problems
that need to be addressed aside from, like,
"Oh, I can't enable hair works."
- "Oh no!"
- Extraneous (beep).
Some of it's small,
like slow driver download speeds.
But some of it is big,
like that Arc control center
is a giant steaming pile of-
- Okay, I have to tell you, though.
- Self-centered.
- Intel refuses to provide an exact timeline
or any other details,
but they heard you, and everyone.
They know the overlay sucks.
- Yes.
- It's going away.
- Good.
- We're getting a non-overlay single app
that will have everything consolidated
into one pane.
- It should have never even existed.
- I know, I know.
But you gotta give them credit
where it's due, okay?
- Yeah.
And the OBS recording issue that I ran into
when I was testing AV1 encoding
shouldn't probably have really existed
or been a problem either.
It was super cool
20% of the time it worked.
And-
- Yes?
- Like immediately after,
it was updated and fixed.
- And that wasn't even an Intel issue
in the first place.
That was an OBS issue.
Which is kind of what I'm talking about.
Whether it's working with partners
or listening to community feedback,
they're kind of on it.
And as critical as this series has been,
I mean even most of this video was-
- Not exactly positive.
- And as much as I'm absolutely
still taking my A770 out
as soon as this camera stops rolling,
in the last 30 days alone,
it's gotten worlds better,
which gives me a lot of hope for the future.
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe go back and check out part one.
Or, better yet,
if you enjoy these kinds of challenges,
why don't you check out
Luke's Blackberry Challenge,
where he switched to a Blackberry.
- It's an amazing video.
You should check it out.