Intel just ATE NVIDIA’S LUNCH for creators!
From outright cloning GeForce Experience, a DLSS competitor, to adaptive sync, to beating
them to the punch with AV1 encoding, the new Arc Alchemist line of dGPUs from Intel are
absolutely wild.
Intel had their announcement presentation today for their new dedicated GPU hardware,
which they’re calling Arc, shipping now in laptops with higher end chips and add-in-cards
teased for later in the year.
Let’s touch on hardware, then talk about gaming, and wrap up with content creation.
The hardware itself seems like a substantially impressive leap over Intel’s previous integrated
GPU tech.
The graphics chips, specifically called Xe HPG, feature new processing cores, a new encode
and decode media engine, a new display output engine, and graphics pipeline.
The Xe HPG hardware is broken up into what Intel is calling “Render Slices” - scalable
up to 8 on the higher end cards.
Render Slices are comprised of their “Xe-cores” which could be seen as normal GPU processing
cores on any GPU, plus dedicated hardware for thread sorting, geometry sample processing,
as well as dedicated hardware raytracing units which support DirectX Raytracing or DXR, and
Vulcan RT, as well.
These cores are optimized for all of the features of DirectX12 Ultimate for gaming, which includes
features like Variable-Rate Shading, Raytracing, Mesh Shading, Sampler Feedback, and so on.
This is kinda great to hear as the original run of dedicated GPUs from Intel we heard
about were primarily for server workflows and not gaming parts, there is a nearly complete
focus on gaming in this product stack.
AI processing both for workloads and gaming came up here with each Xe-core getting 16
1024-bit “Matrix Engines” which are supposed to be optimized for AI, along with 192KB of
shared Level 1 Cache or shared local memory on each core.
The AI gets involved specifically with gaming in the form of AI upscaling - yes, Intel is
releasing their own DLSS competitor.
But instead of being temporal AA upscaling like AMD’s FSR, it’s supposed to actually
be leveraging the AI hardware as with Nvidia’s solution.
This is coming early summer and they already have a small list of games integration the
tech.
Unfortunately, XeSS, as they’re calling it, does need to be integrated on a per-game
basis, which will slow down its adoption - but I do believe this kind of tech is going to
be a default expectation for gaming as time goes on, so it’s great to know Intel has
solutions, too.
To output your games, Intel CLAIMS they have output capabilities “for the future” in
their new Xe Display Engine - but by default we’re looking at HDMI 2.0b and DisplayPort
1.4a.
There is a note in the slides that it’s DisplayPort 2.0 “ready”, but nothing about
HDMI 2.1.
This doesn’t sound very future-proof to me, especially when they’re talking about
360hz at 1440p, and 8K60 and 4K120 in HDR.
I really don’t get why they wouldn’t have HDMI 2.1 ready to go at this point.
Regardless, the chips can handle 4 display pipes at full res, which is very handy.
To handle all of this, 3 types of display syncing are supported.
There’s adaptive sync, which is great.
But then Intel also announced their 2 new “sync” modes - Speed Sync and Smooth Sync.
Speed Sync sounds like what Nvidia Fast Sync is supposed to do, but doesn’t always do
- maintain low latency, zero-tearing monitor sync, without enabling VSync.
It just does a faster and better job of flipping frames over as they become available.
Smooth Sync on the other hand, apparently aims to hide screen tearing a bit by blurring
and dithering the differences between the two frames being displayed at the same time?
In their sample screenshot it literally just looks like they’re just applying a blur
filter at the edges of the tear, which I’m not sure how they’re doing that without
latency, and it’s just a simulation, so we’ll have to test more closely once we
have hands on the hardware.
Gaming is cool, but the new Media Engine is where my interest really lies.
The new Intel Arc GPUs give us the first hardware encoders for AV1 - the open source video encoder
that I’ve been hyping up for YEARS on the channel.
AV1 enables vastly higher qualities at lower bitrates and once more widely adopted will
allow for high resolution and high framerate streaming on sites like YouTube, AND allow
for better-looking, lower-bandwidth playback from websites like Netflix.
YouTube is already COVERED in AV1 videos, if you enable it in your playback preferences
and have the hardware to decode it - but we haven’t had accessible encoders yet.
This is exciting.
I think the GPU can also encode VP9, too?
That’s also nice.
The slide just says “up to 8K60 12-bit HDR decode” and “up to 8K 10-bit HDR encode”
so we’ll have to do some testing to see just how high the AV1 encoder can handle,
specifically, and how the quality compares to the CPU encoders enabled in the recent
OBS update and so on.
Get subscribed so you don’t miss it - AV1 is really the future.
Apparently FFMPEG, Handbrake (which just uses FFMPEG), XSplit, DaVinci Resolve, and Premiere
Pro are already all updated to encode with AV1 on Intel Arc GPUs, so that’s awesome.
Premiere usually takes years to implement new encoders, after all.
Relating to encoding and general content creation workflows, Intel described their “Deep Link”
technology.
This allows the CPU, iGPU, and Arc dGPU to all work together to speed up workflows anymore.
The dream of multi-GPU encoding and video editing seems to be here with this new lineup.
Dynamic Power Share is specifically relevant to laptops, but allows the GPU to be polled
at 100ms intervals to dynamically allocate power between the CPU and GPU to keep both
fed and working at their best, and this can be slowed down when on battery to optimize
for battery life.
Then there’s “Hyper Encode” - and this is literally just splitting up video files
into GOPs or groups-of-pictures, just having the dGPU and iGPU encoding alternating frames,
if both the dGPU and iGPU have the same encoder relevant to the work - to encode much faster
and bring it together at the end.
For H264 and HEVC this will be a MASSIVE performance improvement that streamers and video editors
everywhere would IMMEDIATELY be able to feel the difference in.
For AV1, the iGPU won’t have an AV1 encoder, so this won’t get used.
This can bring up to a 60% transcoding performance jump, which is massive, honestly.
All those questions I get about using multi-GPUs for streaming or video editing...
now have an answer.
This workflow similarly applies to computer workflows, too, with “Hyper Compute.”
This uses a Machine Learning service to dynamically balance workloads between CPU, iGPU, and dGPU,
to make sure the right workloads are assigned to the right places.
Specifically with this tech, Video Enhance AI - which I previously showed off upscaling
old family VHS tapes with - was 2.5x faster on the new Arc GPU than integrated graphics,
and 2.9x faster when leveraging both the Arc GPU AND integrated graphics.
I use Video Enhance AI a lot, but less than I’d like due to speed - I’m excited to
see how this can help that workflow.
Overall with all of this technology, it is VERY laptop focused - which is neat, but I
really hope a lot of this workload sharing can still work out nicely on desktop, as well.
Lastly, I wanted to mention Intel’s new Arc Control app.
There’s no easy way to put this, it’s just straight-up a clone of Nvidia GeForce
Experience.
Perhaps better, as it provides some updates that many of us wish GFE would have gotten
by now.
Arc Control is a “one stop shop” app that allows you to manage and update drivers, tune
and tweak performance, view hardware and game performance stats, manage and optimize game
settings - you know everything GeForce Experience does, even with an in-game overlay.
But it goes beyond that and integrates what would be the Nvidia Broadcast app, too.
Arc Control has a “Creator Studio” feature allowing you to stream or record your gameplay
and create automatic highlights.
It looks fairly basic, but there seems to be a “Sharp Stream” feature that they
didn’t mention, I can assume is either a sharpening filter or an AI Upscale feature,
along with AI webcam processing including background removal, blurring, and replacement,
along with auto framing.
The only missing feature would be AI background noise removal on your mic!
And of course, they had to add a jab that Arc Control does NOT require a login - which
we always complain about being required for GeForce Experience.
Again, the quality and performance of all of these features remains to be seen, we still
have to get our hands on the tech, and only the first lower-end laptops are releasing
now.
More on the actual add-in cards and more powerful laptops is coming later in the year.
But let’s just say, it’s an exciting time for technology.
Make sure you’re ready to stream with this new tech by watching my streaming audio guide
here, or my lighting guide, here.
I’m EposVox the stream professor and remember: Be kind, rewind.