- I am hands on with the Intel Arc A770.
This is their top spec gaming GPU,
and it is very much an unreleased product.
That means that our test systems needed
to be disconnected from the internet,
data collection needed to be disabled,
and we will definitely need
to avoid revealing any FPS counters
so that we don't leak any sensitive performance numbers,
if I care about keeping my promise. (laughs)
(crickets chirping)
With that out of the way, is Intel Arc good?
Should you be excited
for when they launch probably soon?
And should you listen to this segue to our sponsor?
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(upbeat music)
I guess we can drop the pretense, right?
Behind me are two systems
with identical specs running the same game.
One would expect then for them
to have the same level of performance,
but clearly, based purely on my eyes
and not on the clearly visible FPS counters, (coughs)
this one is performing a lot better.
So what's going on here?
The performance disparity
between these two systems is actually a big part
of the reason that Intel flew up here
to show us the current state of things.
The one on your right is running in DirectX 12 mode,
while the other one is in DirectX 11.
So rather than let me puzzle over why this would be,
our good friends, Ryan Shrout and Tom Petersen,
sat down with us to talk about the state of things.
- The Arc team targeted new standards hard.
We have AV1 decode and encode support,
and our lightweight driver is very good
at speaking directly to the GPU hardware
in DX 12 and Vulcan,
making full use of its capabilities.
By the way, the water in this insulated bottle
is both cold and refreshing.
lttstore.com.
(cameraman laughs)
- I made him say that.
The part I'm not gonna make him say,
remember my promise, is that in DirectX 11
and 10 and 9 and et cetera,
that's not really the case.
The thing is, in those earlier versions of DirectX,
to ease development, there are loads of APIs
and driver baggage between the game and the GPU.
Now, the performance can obviously still be good,
but it takes a lot of tweaking in the drivers
and the game before it all works great,
which competitors like Nvidia
and AMD have had literally decades to work on.
So the short version of the bad news, then,
is that in a lot of situations,
a game won't be taking full advantage of an Arc GPU.
And one of the worst examples
of this is here in "Shadow of the Tomb Raider,"
where they drop half of the performance going
from DX 12 to DX 11.
Sorry, excuse me. My promise.
They double going from DX 11 to DX 12.
The point is, however they wanna spin it,
there's a lot of work to be done,
and this optimization dance isn't one
that can be done alone,
putting Intel in a very challenging predicament.
The cold, hard truth is that,
unfortunately, for team blue,
gamers do not exclusively play DirectX 12 and Vulcan games,
making arc, well, a bit of a tough sell
until it's more optimized.
As for game developers, well,
why would they optimize for Arc
unless there's a large enough install base?
See the chicken and egg problem here?
Let's talk about the three-tier strategy
that Intel's planning to use, then,
to beat this chicken and egg into a delicious omelet
- At what we're calling tier one,
we're gonna kill everyone in price to performance.
And in these tier one titles that work really well on Arc,
we've already revealed some of them,
we're going to be best-in-class performance outright,
just like that Floatplane has
the best behind the scenes and exclusive LTT content.
floatplane.com.
(cameraman laughs)
- Let's take a look, then,
at some of those tier one games.
Here's "Cyberpunk" running
at quick preset high and 1440p.
Oh wow. Okay.
That's a higher resolution
than I was actually expecting them to want to show off here.
Oh no, I don't have an FPS counter,
but I could probably approximate it.
Oh, it's hard for me to tell for sure.
This has gotta be somewhere
in the like 50 to 65 FPS range,
if I had to guess.
"Cyberpunk" is a little chunky and a little teary,
and we're not using any kind
of variable refresh rate right now.
I'd say it's actually higher than that.
Alex, what do you think?
- I agree.
- You agree. Thanks.
- I fortunately have turned on my FPS counter.
Well, I'm just running a benchmark,
but you know, that's my job.
In "F1 2021," we're getting about 180 FPS
at 1440p, high-ish settings.
- Which is impressive,
but "F1 2021" is a lighter title.
Honestly, I am more impressed by the fact
that "Cyberpunk" is running at all,
given what a hog this game is.
Now, these are tier one games, though.
They're not gonna let us show you any tier two games yet,
so I have banished them
from hosting any more of the video.
But I am at least allowed to talk about them.
The second tier is your less optimized games,
but ones that are built
on modern APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulcan.
These are still gonna perform pretty well
for the reasons that we discussed before.
Tier three is where things get a little dicey.
In DirectX 11 or earlier,
Arc doesn't always do very well.
And while we, sorry,
had something in my eye there,
weren't able to run any tier three games ourselves
on the A770, there have been enough Arc performance leaks
out there to show you that, yeah,
it can be a little rough.
But Intel has no illusions about this reality,
and they know that gamers expect
to play a wide variety of games
that they can download at random
out of the literally tens of thousands of titles on Steam,
fire it up, and get acceptable, bug-free performance.
So being self-aware
that there are going to be some Arc compromises
and that there are some silicon surplus issues
to work around, they have a bold plan
and the actual real buckets of money
to turn that bold plan into a reality.
Are you guys ready?
Intel is going to be basing their pricing off
of their internal testing of third tier games.
(audience cheers)
Now, they still won't tell us
how much the A770 is going to cost,
but what we do have is some data points that lead us
to believe there are gonna be some pretty happy gamers.
First up is the general state of the industry.
Rumors abound that Nvidia is trying to cancel
or at least delay manufacturing
of a large chunk of their upcoming 40 series GPUs.
And it's pretty safe to say
that given the recent mining crash,
AMD is probably in a similar boat.
We guess, then,
that Intel probably also overproduced Arc silicon
based on projections that they might have made
during the surge in demand for gaming PCs
during the extended COVID lockdowns
over the last couple of years.
I think, then, that it's pretty safe to say that,
aspirations for a large install base aside,
they just plain have some inventory to move.
Next, while the A770,
especially this sexy, limited edition RGB card,
doesn't have an announced price or launch date,
they have actually launched some Arc silicon.
This is the A380.
And its performance isn't particularly exciting,
but its price is.
Starting at 129 US dollars MSRP
with six gigs of GDDR6 memory
and enough performance for 1080p gaming and light titles,
this thing would've been
an absolute godsend during the shortages
and still, even without the shortages,
presents a value proposition
that I wouldn't have thought possible.
It's an entry-level GPU
that you're not a complete idiot for buying.
Next up is the rapidly improving state
of Arc on the software side.
The last time we looked at it,
we said, and rightly so, sorry,
that Intel should be embarrassed
to launch a product in that state.
But in the three short weeks since then,
they have fixed almost every issue we raised,
and we have some background on what happened
with a couple of them.
First up was the problem
with Windows Update constantly rolling back our drivers.
So what happened was there's all this random hardware
on your platform, like all these chips,
all these cards, right?
And everything has an ID
that Windows uses to find the right driver
for your hardware.
Every manufacturer has their own ID.
It's a four-digit string.
Fun fact, Intel's is 8086.
And then there's also an ID for the device itself.
So that's easy then, right?
This driver goes with this pair of IDs. Ta-da!
Well, on laptops, there's kind of two manufacturers,
if you think about it,
and therefore two sets of IDs:
one for the silicon vendor
and one for the system maker.
Now, there's a good reason for this.
Historically, OEMs like Dell or HP needed
to have unique IDs for their implementation
of hardware like a GPU, say,
to specify any power constraints
or display output capabilities.
That means that when Windows Update found two driver matches
for our GPU, one from Intel directly
and one specific one from HP,
with both sets of IDs,
it made sense that it would prefer the HP-specific one
to avoid any unintended driver woes for the user.
The long-term fix for this, then,
is that Intel's first-party driver will need
to take precedence and all OEMs will have to get on board.
Wow, it must be nice to be Intel.
As for the battery life issues,
that's a bit more complicated
and has to do with power states.
G2 is a high-power idle state, about 40 watts.
And that's where we were stuck.
Now, Arc supports G8,
which is more like a 10-watt idle power state,
but unfortunately, they were in the final stages
of enabling that state in the driver,
and so it wasn't there yet.
It will be, along with other fixes, in August.
Even with future driver updates, though,
there are some caveats
that you potential Arc customers should be aware of.
And I'd say the biggest one
is your system's support for resizable BAR.
It's a feature that you enable in your BIOS.
So you can go check if it's there.
And it's a bit complicated,
so I'm not gonna go into the full details right now,
but basically, an Arc GPU's memory controller benefits a lot
from being able to execute fewer larger data transfers
rather than many, many smaller ones
when it's loading textures, shaders,
geometry, or anything else that goes
from the CPU to the GPU.
With that said, Arc also has some competitive advantages
that we touched on in our last video,
and they haven't gone away.
When it works, it is an encoding powerhouse.
I mean, AV1 encoding in particular
is the kind of thing that you're unlikely
to care about today,
but could actually be the difference between,
"This thing is a paperweight,"
and, "Ooh, I could still use this in my secondary machine
or my Plex server five, six, seven years from now."
It also has a lot of dedicated silicon
for machine-learning-driven features like AI upscaling,
though I wasn't able to test that either.
What I can test is overclocking.
(explosive explodes)
- Performance tuning.
- Now, do note that they screwed it up
and they don't have an apply thing,
so it's a live slider. - Oh.
It's a live slider.
Oh, better not just. (laughs)
- The performance boost,
basically, it changes your VF curve.
Am I right? - Yes. Yep.
- Yeah.
- Okay. - So if you have
better silicon than normal- - But again,
it's a little early.
But go for it.
- Okay.
- Yeah, if you have better silicon than normal,
you might be able to just boost it up a bit.
- So what, I just fire my game back up
and I might have boosted performance?
- Yeah. - Oh, I guess
we can actually see our clocks.
Am I allowed to show those?
- I'm not sure if that's working right,
but maybe. - Oh, yeah,
it seems to be locked.
The GPU temperature is locked at 69 degrees Celsius.
There's no way I believe- - Actually, I think
that is correct. - that's an accident.
- [Tom] No, no no. I think that's true.
That's true.
- You think that's true?
- [Tom] Yeah.
- Nice.
I don't think that CPU activity is right at 4%, though.
- Yeah, that's got bugs.
- Yeah, that's probably a little wrong.
I can't tell.
Is this placebo or is this actually a little faster?
- [Tom] I think it is.
- I'm getting less tearing.
I think it might actually be faster.
I think it's working.
Okay. You told me this wasn't gonna work.
Did it just crash on you? - Well, slide it more
and you'll crash it.
Well, there's no reason to have a temperature limit.
I don't care about any of that.
Okay. Should I turn the power limit up?
- Yeah. Why not?
- I mean, should be fine, right?
- [Tom] Yeah, what could go wrong?
- Yeah, what could go wrong?
- [Alex] So none of that changed.
- Yeah.
Also, I think I'm getting more tearing,
which doesn't necessarily actually mean
that performance is worse.
Tearing is a function
of your frame rate versus your refresh rate,
and it's a little more complex
than just better FPS, tearing go away.
But what I am seeing is, well,
it looked like I was getting multiple tears
for a second there,
which could actually mean that our FPS went up.
You saw that?
- [Alex] Yes.
Are you sure you don't- - If you hit Alt + I again,
you can do it in game and you'll get a big display.
- [Alex] Oh, it's working.
- Oh wait,
it's working? - Yeah.
I guess this is bugged. - Oh, I mean, this is working.
- [Alex] Yeah.
- Oh. Oh, well, that's cool.
It's very clear that this is definitely performing better
than we started.
So the overclocking utility works far better
than Alex told me it was.
I mean, should we give her more beans?
- [Alex] Sure.
- [Tom] What a great idea!
- Oh, oh.
- [Tom] Ah, see?
- [Alex] That means it works, though. (laughs)
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- If you guys enjoyed this video,
I'm gonna try something new
and throw you to a different channel.
These gents were actually just up visiting our friends
at GamersNexus as well.
And it's definitely a worthwhile watch,
if you wanna learn more about what makes Arc tick.