- Hey, what happened to all my footage
in the Arc video?
- Uh, what footage?
- Well, the graphic card install footage,
all the gaming footage, all that stuff.
There's just one little snippet at the end.
What happened?
- Uh...
- The card turned on, fans are full blast.
I think this might actually be an Arc problem.
- Yeah, this weird, - Okay.
- But interesting.
- Game streaming on Arc is basically broken.
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- When Linus switched his personal gaming rig to use an Arc,
he had the problem
of not having the properly sized power connectors.
Well, that happened to me too.
I had two solid eight pin connectors
for an eight and six pin graphics card.
I did not want to bother with re-pinning my custom cables,
so I did the next best thing.
I had this spare 1,200 watt Antec power supply
from back in the NCX days,
and I had no idea if it was even going to power on
after sitting in my garage for all these years,
but we needed it to start playing.
And my plan for it is, I have jumped it,
so this is going from pin four to pin five,
just jumped it with a little paper clip,
and I'm going to plug in this guy,
just into the graphics card,
because I am too sick
and too lazy to undo all of my power runs right now.
I don't wanna completely swap the power supply.
It worked! And I don't care if it's jankey.
I love it, it's mine, and you can't take it from me,
not even if the PSU was clearly stolen from work.
Time to game!
Almost.
Linus wasn't quite ready yet,
so I installed my drivers
and started poking at Intel Arc Control,
their first-party graphics card companion app thing.
What a nightmare.
If I click away from it, it just closes.
It didn't go anywhere,
it's not accessible, it just closes.
UI elements behind the translucent parts of the window
would still like, highlight and interact with your mouse,
even though you couldn't actually select them,
and you can't drag the window around?
What? Why?
Oh, of course, it's an overlay,
at all points in time, for no reason.
Neither NVIDIA nor AMD are using just an overlay.
GeForce Experience and Radeon Adrenalin
both have full applications that can run in the background
and just be moved around the screen if you want.
Why would you start with just an overlay?
I actually hate it so much.
And not just it,
the driver page is just a hyperlinked picture
taking you to Intel's download page.
What? You can't update it through the app?
That's like the whole reason
people install GeForce Experience.
Performance monitoring is wacky,
because it doesn't run in the background.
Highlights only work in supported games,
and not that many of them, to be clear,
and the in-game overlay just stays up all the time,
regardless of what's open,
and there's no history if you close the main overlay,
the in-game overlay doesn't record things,
it just shows it in real-time.
What?
Whatever, it's fine.
Nobody gets it right the first time,
let's just focus on the game experience, Luke.
Come on, okay.
The first one we tried was "Halo Infinite,"
and honestly, for the most part, it ran pretty well.
- FPS dropped for a few seconds? Oh, interesting.
- I'm still at zero drop frame.
- Someone in chat, "LMAO just bought the A770."
- But I did start getting some weird anomalies.
Massive blooming in both the menus and the loading screens,
but once we got into a match, it cleared up.
Maybe this was "Halo," maybe Arc,
hard to tell, both feel kinda jankey sometimes.
Either way, weird, but nothing game-breaking.
Performance was okay.
It seemed like a steady 60 plus FPS in the match we played,
and I personally didn't really have any issues.
So we hopped over to "Anno 1800"
to see if we could figure it out.
- It looks like game streaming on Arc is basically broken.
Now, I'm not using the AV1 encoder, right?
So maybe the AV1 encoder would do a better job,
but because it's not supported on major streaming platforms,
like say, for example, Twitch yet,
there's no real purpose for it yet.
- This whole time, I was encoding through x264 on my CPU,
and everything was perfectly fine.
No dropped frames, great quality stream,
performance was all right,
but Linus was streaming with H.264 on his GPU
and it was causing all sorts of problems.
- My GPU encoding just outright crashed,
so I'm back with CPU encoding.
Who would've thought that the best pairing for an Intel GPU
is an AMD CPU with lots of cords?
(Luke laughing)
Yeah, this is not running too great.
- And it kept just actually completely cutting out,
pretty much the whole time.
But the game was still playable for me at least,
I panned around some open water and Arctic towns,
then checked out a much fuller and complete city
with a ton of stuff going on, and it was totally fine.
It feels fine now guys,
like 100%, it feels fine.
So we moved on to "Untitled Goose Game,"
which we played through Steam Remote Play,
just like you should consider moving on
from YouTube to Floatplane,
where we've got plenty of exclusives
and behind-the-scenes content.
Things went perfectly fine with our squawking geese
for the first little bit,
until my game started turning into
an awful watercolor painting.
My screen is like, messed up.
- [Linus] Really?
- It's super, super messed up.
I don't know why I'm only like,
mentally registering this now.
Okay, it fixed there.
We had no idea what could be causing this,
until we realized,
Linus was hosting a remote play together session.
The best part about all of this
was when we checked Advanced Settings,
and it said encoding was enabled on NVIDIA,
AMD, and Intel IGPU,
because it hadn't been updated for Arc yet.
We tried to fix it by disabling hardware decoding
on my side, but it wasn't until Linus
disabled hardware-accelerated Encoding on his PC
that had actually resolved the issue.
I then hosted a game of "Ultimate Chicken Horse"
through remote play,
so we could make sure it wasn't just Linus, and,
- This is remote play together,
but we're not using Steam, we're using PowerPoint.
- If you just want a game on Arc
with no streaming of any kind,
then yeah, so far, it works.
We had one issue in "Disc Jam"
where the game wouldn't go past 720p,
leaving us stuck in a resolution much older
than the game itself.
But the performance was pretty okay
in the games we tried,
as long as it wasn't over remote play.
Since then, I've tried out
"Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II,"
and "Anno 1800," "Assassins Creed Odyssey,"
"Inscryption," "Slay the Spire,"
and quite a few other games,
and had no major issues that other people didn't also have.
It sort of felt like I was having more total issues
than I feel like I would've had
if I was on my previous TITAN RTX,
but there was no way to really prove that,
and in general, everything ran pretty okay.
I had one hard crash that felt like it was similar
to what would happen if you had a driver crash on NVIDIA,
but the system didn't recover from it at all
like you would expect it to with an NVIDIA driver crash
where the popup comes in the corner,
the application force closes, all that type of stuff.
It just black screened hard.
I had to hard power down my computer, bring it back up,
and then Event Viewer just had nothing.
There was no information,
so I have no idea what happened.
Maybe it was Arc, maybe it was something else, I don't know.
The question then becomes,
how badly do you need GPU encoding in 2023, I guess?
This is a $350 graphics card,
and right now, you can get an RTX 3060
for about the same price,
and the RX6650 XT is cheaper,
at a little over 300 bucks.
And both of these cards
have significantly better hardware encoding,
at least right now.
Arc boasts major AV1 performance,
which looks, as of right now, to be the future of encoding.
So that's great, right?
And OBS can encode it now, right?
Wrong. OBS has an NVENC AV1 encoder, NVIDIA only.
Intel's hardware AV1 encoding is (bleep) useless
if you have no way to use it.
Don't buy anything based on the claims of future benefits.
But all of that being said, the challenge isn't over yet.
Maybe there's some light
at the end of this poorly-encoded tunnel.
Apparently Intel has reached out to Linus with a new driver
that might fix VR,
so stay tuned for our final thoughts in part three.
And if you wanna pick up an Arc card,
we'll have them linked in the description down below,
along with our sponsor.
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- Thanks for watching.
And if you like this or didn't like this,
let me know down below,
it's been a long time since I've hosted one of these.
But if you need something else to watch,
maybe check out part one
so you can see some of the hilarious problems
that might come up when you're doing something as simple
as just swapping to a brand new graphics cart.