Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Switching to Intel Arc – Conclusion!”.
Who, in their right mind, would choose anything but the best possible solution for the money? I’Ve never been able to figure it out, but then against my deepest instincts. That is exactly what I did and me for 30 days. We have both been running Intel Arc gpus in our primary gaming rigs dealing with everything from Annoying software to low performance drivers to Broken functionality. I haven’t been able to play Minecraft dungeons with my kids in a month yikes, but then I don’t know what maybe halfway through about halfway. I think yeah yeah something happened. I stopped doing the arc Challenge and I started just using my computer yeah. I kind of just forgot about it. I still have some bones to pick with Intel’s GPU team to be very clear, but like that urgent feeling, I had to just like work it out of my computer. Well, it’s been replaced with like I’m gon na.
Do it still, but uh I’ll get around to it, get around to it eventually, right most of the problems I was having were more related to potentially the applications or games that just have problems all the time like we play Star, Citizen yeah well like and sure There was problems, but it was Star Citizen I played tarkov same deal. Not many of the issues were clearly attributable to just the arc GPU itself and we’re obviously not the only ones. The a770 has 4.3 eggs out of five on NewEgg and just shy of four stars on Amazon for a product we wrote off then rooted for then completely wrote off. That’S kind of outstanding, pretty good, pretty good, like our sponsor thorum thorum, makes elegant rings out of unique materials from meteorite to dinosaur bone use code LTT to get 20 off today and stay tuned to learn more for the conspiracy theorists out there.
No, this challenge was not sponsored by Intel and what better way to prove it than to open with all the things that went wrong. A lot of things went wrong. First up is my issues with VR.
I did eventually get it working thanks to a closed alpha driver from Intel, but to say that it’s not ideal would be an understatement. I can mostly play stationary games like beatsaber, but anything even marginally. More demanding, especially with movement, is a big problem. I can only play the virtual reality, Rick and Morty game for about 20 minutes at a time, for example, before succumbing to nausea, so just like in our last challenge, VR was essentially a no-go for me and even worse that marginal VR experience cost me basic functionality On the same PC here in the rec room that my kids use for couch gaming, so I was woken up early on more than one Saturday, because the TV won’t turn on which seems to be some kind of display. Wake bug in the alpha driver.
I won’t hold that against them, though, not when there are plenty of inconveniences in the public drivers that I can hold against them like. What is this? Why do I have to look at this limited DisplayPort functionality message every time my PC wakes from sleep, the worst part is: there’s no limited functionality. It’S working fine, I don’t know for sure if it’s actually caused by Arc, but I’ve never seen this message before. So have you received a notification from it that you have wanted to see? No, I can’t say that I have yikes yeah.
I ran into things like that. A lot system crashes with no Event Viewer logs, weird graphical issues, mostly with Reflections in various games, really spiky lag, and I don’t know. I saw that in Halo, infinite yeah, it’s in a range of different games, but not all of them, which is weird. I I can’t say for sure that any of this was actually caused by Arc, but I’ve never really seen anything like it before and full disclosure.
I already pulled out my a770 for the tarkov wipe. I tried at the beginning of the wipe and it was horrible and okay. It was over a month and a half. So the fact that we’re filming this now – and it’s already out is fine all right, but I installed at the beginning of the wipe.
It was terrible okay, I installed my previous card still terrible, oh, but not quite as terrible, but that’s probably a gap in price and yada yada. The truth is, I actually pulled one already too, but for good reason I mean the kids couldn’t play. It takes two on the rec room PC because of the blank display issue, and it was at like 29 days anyway, a couple of other lingering issues, though, with my setup, are to do with black levels and cable compatibility, cable compatibility. This one is bizarre, active cables like fiber optic, HDMI or DisplayPort cables.
Just outright do not seem to work on Arc. It’S fine to run a standard cable into a thunderbolt card, then run Optical Thunderbolt. To a dock then plug a standard cable from the dock into the monitor. But I couldn’t run any long run.
Cables like these ones straight out of the back of the a770 to a display without getting a garbled image or most of the time, no image at all. It makes no sense to me because I would think that a cable with its own built-in signal repeater, would, you know, be even less susceptible to low signal strength on the video output, which is usually the issue in these cases. But I didn’t imagine, this Intel seems to have been able to reproduce my issue on their end and are apparently working on a fix. Oh ah those run all the in-ceiling speakers that will be a video get subscribed.
Don’T look look at ltdstore.com, where we have amazing hoodies, like the swacet and Wan hoodie. Here’S another bizarre one check out the black levels on this display. I messaged them about this a while back. I think this started when I first connected my projector to the secondary output of the card through a thunderbolt Hub and Optical Thunderbolt, cable, of course, but I’ve since disconnected that and updated my drivers and it doesn’t seem to have improved now.
There would be nothing of normal about this if I was on an LCD display, but this is an OLED. This is a black background and it is distinctly Gray now I think I have a theory. Actually.
I have a couple of theories. First of all watch this when I switch it over to HDR. The problem goes away. It’S now black. If I plug into my wife’s computer running an Nvidia card. Well, it doesn’t matter if it’s SDR or HDR, it works fine.
So I think it’s something to do with SDR video and the full versus limited RGB range values, but I don’t see any obvious way to change that in the arc Control software which software okay yeah. That is definitely another ongoing problem. I talked about that plenty.
In part, one or 1.5 or whatever it was, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop now. Intel’S approach to GPU software literally makes no sense to me at all. If you already have a desktop GPU controller and you do yeah for the onboard Graphics, why do you need art control another app, and I hesitate to even call it that, because it’s an overlay that also does almost nothing even the built-in driver. Updater doesn’t really like work. I didn’t get notifications for new drivers and when I set it to update automatically, I did the same thing.
It didn’t work. I did the same thing I set it to update automatically on Sundays at 2. Am I came back two weeks after an updated dropped and there was no update and then, when I went to manually update, I had to click it three times to get it to start doing anything, and then it had no progress indicator whatsoever. So we were actually gaming together at the time time. Luke and my son are both waiting for me. Well, I’m sitting here going look we’re about to play CS go, I need this driver update and I have no idea how long it’s gon na take. I ended up getting it through the Intel driver updater, not even art control, because it just didn’t work which frustrating, because the driver updates that landed while we were doing the challenge were actually really impressive.
Yes, Arc gpus iron, ironically, really struggle in older games, and this is for a number of reasons. Architecturally. They were designed for newer apis dx12 Vulcan in particular, and on the software side.
Intel’S Arc team hasn’t spent the last 20 years coming up through those generations of games. So there’s a lot of holes dx9 in particular, is not supported in Hardware at all on Arc, Alchemist and Intel shifted strategy last summer to rely on emulation to support these games, which has led to some kind of embarrassing results. But we got to see a lot of that change right before our eyes.
They pulled off double almost triple digit performance improvements right smack in the middle of the challenge, taking some key problem games from embarrassing to acceptable pretty much overnight and the way that they did, it is really cool. Dxvk was originally developed for porting native Windows games to Linux. It is not emulation, but rather a trans isolation, layer that takes DirectX API calls and converts them to an equivalent Vulcan API call. It’S a key component of the proton compatibility tool that powers the valve steam deck and the thing is while it was designed for Linux, nothing prevents you from using it on, say, windows. I mean the first proof of concept that I saw on this was done manually by an end user. The difference is that Now intel is taking that and baking it right into their drivers, but that isn’t to say that they’re suddenly perfect here’s some footage of a CS.
Go gaming session with Luke running on the dxvk driver, see I wasn’t lying. These are bad and that’s one of the games that was specifically called out as improved by Intel yeah, and this is another yikes aside from performance stutters. I also got a completely black screen when I was trying to access the menu, which is why I couldn’t change teams for a while there. I wouldn’t describe these dips and performance as constant and when they weren’t happening it was performing really well, but they were definitely regular.
The weird thing is, I just thought he was bad, because mine was running fine. The frustrating thing about its failings is that when Arc does well, it does really well. I was sure when we fired up Star Citizen it just wasn’t gon na work, we’re gon na be watching a slide. I thought it was going to be an absolute crap show terrible right, but it was actually fine.
It was just a less powerful GPU than what I had before, but it was no problem at least no more of a problem than anything is in Star Citizen, fair enough, and I saw the same in Halo infinite aside from just being less powerful than my 3090. It was fine once I adjusted my expectations right and turned off Reflections. Yeah, I’m not sure it’s Reflections specifically, but I had some pretty bad problems.
I can only really describe it as purple lights. I had no idea what you were talking about until finally, I saw it at the end of the Star Citizen session. Okay, yeah, that’s actually helpful. It’S it’s really weird turning Reflections down or even off in some situations can tend to resolve them pretty much across the board, but I basically just did that and then completely forgot about it, because some level of reflection would still work.
It was kind of a wake-up call actually for me doing this challenge like when we review a new GPU. We are so laser focused on new rendering features like Ray tracing or who provides the utmost in image quality, with all the details, cranked or whatever. Who has three percent more FPS, but in the real world, when I’m sitting in a dark room hanging out with the boys clicking heads those little details, don’t matter all I really care about is: is the frame delivery smooth enough, which is probably why Arc is ending Up with these four star reviews, I mean obsessive enthusiasts, are going to compare and contrast with the best that Nvidia and AMD have to offer and they’re gon na find it sorely lacking yeah, not really gon na work out there, but I mean think about it.
It wasn’t that long ago for me, but turning off that setting that just like doesn’t work was just a fact of life, and I didn’t worry about it. What’S the difference here? Well, the difference is that we’re talking about spending your own hard-earned money versus using whatever your parents happen to bring home from Best Buy. This is a product that you chose true, and there are experiential problems that need to be addressed.
Aside from like, oh, I can’t enable Hair Works. Oh no extraneous Bulls, some of it’s small like slow driver, download speeds, but some of it is big like that art control center is a giant steaming pile of okay. I have to tell you, though, self-centered Intel refuses to provide an exact timeline or any other details, but they heard you and everyone.
They know the overlay sucks. Yes, it’s going away good we’re getting a non-overlay single app that will have everything Consolidated into one pane. It should have never even existed. I know I know, but you got to give them credit where it’s due okay, yeah and like the OBS recording issue that I ran into when I was testing av1 encoding shouldn’t probably have really existed, have been a problem either. It was super cool, yes, 20 of the time it worked and yes, like immediately after it was updated and fixed, and that wasn’t even an Intel issue in the first place. That was an OBS issue which is kind of what I’m talking about, whether it’s working with Partners or listening to community feedback, they’re kind of on it and as critical as this Series has been.
I mean even most of this. Video was not exactly positive and as much as I’m absolutely still taking my a770 out as soon as this camera stops rolling in the last 30 days alone. It’S gotten worlds better, which gives me a lot of Hope for the future. The future, where I’m going to tell you about our sponsor thorum thorum, has been in business for over a decade, handcrafting unique bands and rings out of rare materials with rings made out of titanium, Ironwood, meteorite and even real dinosaur bone.
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