- Intel talks about quality a lot.
Today, they had the opportunity to walk that talk,
and this is what it looked like.
(whimsical music)
(horn honks)
You know how we mock Apple
for going out on stage year after year after year,
"This year's iPhone is the..."
- Best iPhone that we have ever created.
- It's ridiculous, right?
Obviously the new one is better,
and water is also wet, right?
Well, after seeing this laptop,
I'm never gonna laugh at that again.
Because thanks to Intel's long-awaited
Arc A370 discrete GPU,
the new Spectre x360 from HP
is actually worse than the old RTX 3050 model,
and not just by a little bit.
Now, slow?
That I could overlook.
But buggy to the point where Alex
described some of its functions as barely working?
That's an embarrassment for any organization,
let alone one the size of Intel.
Now obviously, these are very strong claims
we're making here, but don't worry.
Unfortunately, we've got receipts,
and we'll show them to you.
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(upbeat music)
(Alex sighs)
- As the writer of this video,
I want to make it clear that I did not want to do this.
I've had lengthy calls with Intel's engineers
and worked really hard to show the strengths of Intel's Arc
because I'm excited for it.
I was two years old the last time
a new player entered the discreet GPU market
and I was not sure it would ever happen again,
but I was I was hopeful.
I wanted this to be positive
because AMD and Nvidia's duopoly
has been in clear need of some disruption.
But unfortunately, I can only review
the hardware that's in front of me-
- And it's a dumpster fire.
The naming scheme for Arc graphics
goes Arc 3, Arc 5, and Arc 7.
So the a A370M in our Spectre x360 16-inch
is kind of like the best of their i3 tier discrete GPUs.
Follow along so far? Good.
Based on its positioning then, Intel had no expectations
that it would be able to beat the RTX 3050 in gaming.
And they were correct about that.
In our testing, the 3050 is a solid 30% faster in games
despite being confined to the same chassis.
Which wouldn't be a problem,
except that the Arc-equipped version is priced $80 higher.
Oh, and also, in certain games,
even AMD's integrated graphics are able to beat it.
With that said,
this performance level is kind of acceptable
given that Intel isn't really marketing this
as a gaming card.
At 1080p on medium to low settings,
you can get a playable experience in most games.
And aside from occasional stuttering,
we barely saw any driver issues.
I mean, Intel, wasn't expecting to beat Nvidia at gaming.
Instead, they want to leverage hardware encoders
to beat them at content creation.
And it's to the point where 40% of the die area
is actually dedicated to non-traditional gaming things.
Let's talk about that.
Each Intel Arc GPU is made up of render slices,
and the main difference between a low-end
and a high-end GPU from Intel
is the number of render slices.
So the A370M has eight of them.
In each render slice you'll find four Xe cores
that are comprised of 16 Xe Vector engines.
These are what take care of rendering your games,
each being roughly equivalent to an execution unit
in Intel's IGPUs.
You'll also find 16 Xe Matrix engines
which are dedicated to AI tasks like upscaling.
Along with the four Xe cores, you get four ray-tracing units
along with some other stuff to, you know,
make it actually work as a GPU.
All of this hardware dedicated to AI and matrix manipulation
means then that in tasks like Topaz Video Enhance AI,
video encoding and upsampling should work incredibly well,
and they do.
Doubling the resolution of this Floatplane exclusive video
that we downloaded at 480p
actually gave us a small win for Intel.
We got 0.22 seconds per frame compared to Nvidia's 0.24.
Or at least we did when the Intel system worked.
Most of the time, Nvidia won by simply not crashing.
In DaVinci Resolve,
Intel was able to leverage their AV1 encoders though
to pull out a huge win against the 3050.
Though again, this was by default
because you can't do AV1 encoding on the 3050,
so we have no way to compare performance apples to apples.
Not to mention that AV1 encoding
is only just beginning to find its usefulness in 2022.
Can't say the same about the WAN hoodie though.
It's full of pockets and looks awesome.
LTTstore.com.
In HandBrake, we...
Well, let's just say the numbers
that we are about to show you
took three days of back and forth with Intel's engineers.
As of June 22nd, 2022,
here's what you Arc owners out there,
all dozens of you, will need to do to use HandBrake.
First, get the latest drivers,
not from Windows Update,
not from Intel's driver utility,
but rather, you will need to check a blog post
to see if they've posted anything new.
Then you'll need the latest nightly version
of HandBrake off of GitHub.
The mainline version does not support Intel Arc yet.
At this point, you'll have to be very, very careful
not to let Windows Update run,
because for whatever reason,
Windows Update will roll back the GPU drivers
to an older version, and if this happens,
it will completely break HandBrake
and you'll have to uninstall and remove everything
from AppData and start over.
Once all that's complete, you can set up your render.
Nvidia's RTX 3050 was able to render out
that 4K Floatplane exclusive,
which by the way you can watch
if you go over to floatplane.com,
in 10 minutes and one seconds.
Then, with the same settings,
our Intel Arc A370M didn't get past 0%.
The video memory filled up and then nothing happened.
After a call with Intel's engineers,
we realized that we had used a strange resolution,
and by using a different 1080p file,
the A370M actually completed that video encode
in just two-thirds the time of the 3050.
Wow.
So when Intel is able
to get their video encoders to consistently work,
Arc might be a compelling value for video editors.
Or maybe as an encoding coprocessor
if you have a real GPU in your system?
- [Alex] No!
- The real disappointment here though
isn't that a developer version of HandBrake
doesn't encode weird resolutions.
It's that Windows will screw up your drivers.
Remember that whole Wintel Alliance thing?
I mean, if there's one thing I expect from Intel,
it's that they're gonna work with Microsoft
to give you a seamless experience out of the box.
This was anything but.
Anyhoo, another way to leverage Arc's AI capabilities
is Xe Super Sampling.
It's Intel's take on Nvidia DLSS and it sounds great,
especially when you've got an underpowered GPU
that needs all the upsampling that it can do.
The problem is that it needs to be enabled
on a per-game basis.
Oh, and also it isn't available yet.
So even though there's a bunch
of apparently very impressive AI hardware on the A370M,
the software side is so incomplete
that we weren't able to show you
a single demo of that hardware.
I'm kind of reminded of Nvidia's RTX launch.
Except that that included a really fast GPU as well.
- [Alex] Oh!
- One area Intel should excel though is power management.
In laptops, there's a very small budget
for power compared to desktops,
and making sure that that power is shared
between the CPU and GPU properly
can net you more performance
and better battery life across the board.
To achieve this, Intel Arc laptops have a control loop
that monitors what the CPU and the GPU are doing
and assigns power targets every 100 milliseconds.
GPU activity is the main driver here,
and they'll give the GPU more power
until it starts to be starved for utilization,
at which point they'll start allocating power budget
back to the CPU.
Now, currently on gaming laptops,
setting your CPU and GPU power targets independently
can net you 15% more FPS
if you absolutely nail that balance.
Can also lose you 15% performance if you get it wrong,
so this is a welcome addition.
Now, Nvidia does have a similar feature
called Dynamic Boost 2.0,
but on paper, Intel's approach
will allow for much greater flexibility
when it comes to power allocation.
Except that in our testing, the old Spectre x360,
remember, with the Nvidia GPU,
and also further hampered by an 11th-gen CPU,
got better battery life.
In talking to both Intel and HP,
this shouldn't have happened.
But in talking to Intel more,
so many aspects of this review should have gone better,
and yet they didn't.
So it's clear that Intel needs more time
to get the bugs ironed out, which raises the question:
why is this for sale?
Well, from our point of view,
Intel is kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place here.
On the one hand, they've gotta get the software right.
If somebody buys an Intel GPU today
and has a terrible experience,
you can bet they're not gonna be back for round two
when Battlemage drops, even if it does end up
being competitive with the best from AMD and Nvidia.
But then at the same time,
they have to get these out the door
before Nvidia's RTX 4000 series is announced.
The last thing they wanna do
is launch their top-end Arc A780
only to have it get embarrassed by an RTX 4050 Ti.
They also can only find so many problems in their own lab.
So yeah, I guess this is me saying the quiet part out loud.
The people that buy an Arc GPU now
are essentially beta testers for Intel.
Alex alone has now found multiple bugs
that are now in the queue to be fixed.
It's just too bad that the timeline slipped so far.
If they had actually been able to release this
in Q1 like they had planned,
I'm sure loads of gamers
would've been okay being an early adopter
just to get their hands on literally anything
to play games with.
Now, with GPU prices getting back to MSRP,
or in some cases even below,
that early adopter tax is gonna be a lot harder to swallow.
Does this mean then that Intel's Arc GPUs
are a complete dud?
Well, no.
Something everyone seems
to have kind of forgotten at this point
is how terrible Ryzen was when it first launched.
There were firmware bugs.
We had multiple motherboards just spontaneously brick.
You needed super specific RAM sticks to even get it to post,
and even then, that RAM probably couldn't run
at its rated speed despite Ryzen being so reliant
on fast memory to perform well.
I mean, heck, there were USB bugs
that have only been recently sorted out.
So I don't want to count out Intel's Arc just yet.
I mean, if you think about it, it's truly incredible
that Intel was able to ship a discrete GPU at all,
and I genuinely hope that in a year,
we're gonna be praising it.
But today, like Alex said,
we can only review the hardware in front of us,
and I just can't.
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- Well, that was quite a train wreck.
If you want to watch something that worked out
surprisingly well instead of surprisingly poorly,
maybe check out the video where we hot-rodded a Steam Deck.
It's kinda awesome.