Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I hope no one gets fired for this… – Intel Arc A770 First Look”.
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 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 segway to our sponsor smart, deploy now powered by pdq.com? It’S zero touch, zero headache, pc management for it you can deploy windows, apps and drivers from the cloud no vpn required. Get your free subscription worth over 500 at smartdeploy.com linus we’re going to have that linked down below. 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.
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 peterson sat down with us to talk about the state of things. The arc team targeted new standards hard, we have av-1, decode and encode support, and our lightweight driver is very good at speaking directly to the gpu hardware in dx12 and vulkan, making full use of its capabilities by the way the water in this insulated bottle is both Cold and refreshing lttstore.com, i made him say that the part i’m not going to make him say remember.
My promise is that in directx, 11 and 10 and 9 and etc. 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 dx12 to dx11. Sorry, excuse me, my promise they double going from dx11 to dx12. The point is, however: they want to 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 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 is planning to use, then to beat this chicken and egg into a delicious omelet at what we’re calling tier one we’re going to 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.
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 got to be somewhere in the like 50 to 65 fps range, if i had to guess cyberpunk’s 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 uh? I agree you agree thanks. I fortunately turned on my fps counter. Well, i’m just running a benchmark, but you know that’s that’s my job in f120 21 we’re getting 180 fps at 1440p.
Highest settings, which is impressive, but f1 2021 is a lighter title. Honestly, i’m more impressed by the fact that cyberpunk is running at all, given what a hog this game is now. These are tier 1 games, though they’re not going to. Let us show you any tier 2 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 going to perform pretty well, for the reasons that we discussed before tier 3 is where things get a little dicey in direct x11 or earlier arc doesn’t always do very well, and while we sorry, i had something in my eye. There weren’t able to run any tier 3 games ourselves on the a70. 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, you guys ready intel is going to be basing their pricing off of their internal testing of third tier games. Now they still won’t tell us how much the a7d is going to cost, but what we do have is some data points that lead us to believe there are going to 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 guessed, 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 coveted 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 a70, especially this sexy limited edition rgb card, doesn’t have an announced price or launch date.
They have actually launched smart silicon. This is the a380 and its performance isn’t particularly exciting, but its price is starting. At 129, usd msrp with six gigs of gdr6 memory and enough performance for 1080p gaming and light titles. This thing would have 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 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 art 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 bio, so you can go check if it’s there and it’s a bit complicated. So i’m not going to go into the full details right now, but basically an arcgpus 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 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 performance tuning performance tuning now do note that they they screwed it up and they don’t have an apply thing.
So just it’s! It’S a live! Slider! It’S a live! Slider! Oh better! Better! Not you know the performance boost it. Basically, it changes your vf curve. Am i right yep yeah? Okay, so if you have better again it’s a little early but go for it. You know: okay yeah. If you have better silicon than normal, you might be able to just okay boost it up a bit. I just like fire my game back up and i might have like boosted performance. Oh i guess we can actually see our clocks am i i’m am.
I allowed to show those i’m not sure. If that’s working right but oh yeah, it seems to be locked. The gpu temperature is locked at 69 degrees celsius. There’S no way, i believe. That’S! No! No! I think that’s true.
That’S true. You think that’s true yeah nice. I don’t think that cpu activity is right at four percent, though yeah, that’s good, yeah, that’s probably a little wrong.
I can’t tell is this placebo, or is this actually a little faster? 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 going to work.
Did it just crash it more and then 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 yeah should be fine right yeah. What could go wrong yeah? What could go wrong? 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 looked like. I was getting multiple tears for a second there, which could actually mean that our fps went up. You saw that, yes, are you sure you hit alt-eye again, you can do it in game and you’ll get a big display. Oh it’s working! Oh wait! It’S working! Yeah! Oh this is this: is working 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 sure what a great idea – oh, oh ah, see.
That means it works, though, just like this segway to our sponsor micro center micro center is one of the best places to shop for desktops, laptops, computer components and all of your technology needs get the best prices and best selection on computer hardware at any one of Micro center’s 25 locations across the us new micro center customers can get an additional 25 off all amd and intel cpus. If you combine this coupon with their 20 off select motherboard and cpu bundles, you can save 45 in total, if you’re an existing micro center customer you’re in luck, submit your pc to micro center’s, build showcase for a coupon on your next purchase, click, the link below And shop at micro center today, if you guys enjoyed this video, i’m gon na try something new and three to a different channel. These gents were actually just up visiting our friends at gamer’s nexus as well, and it’s definitely a worthwhile watch. If you want to learn more about what makes arc tick, .