Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Revenge of the ARC A770!! Update”.
I just want a game with the best performance possible. Have you been introduced to the Intel Arc a770 Phantom gaming Edition from ASRock the drivers for this have been updated, making this video February 2023, some big performance gains and some big performance claims by Intel. But, as is often the case, the truth is a little murkier than that. It’S not quite as clear-cut to be sure. Intel has posted very impressive games with their a770.
This is actually a pretty good launch for Intel. Player 3 has entered the game XE SS. Arguably one of the best Technologies to come out of the Intel ramp up in the GPU space, but there’s actually a lot of subtlety and Nuance here. Let’S Dive In so Intel released, new drivers and a lot of people have covered the new drivers and Intel themselves have said you can expect up to a 41 performance Improvement. I’Ve got my a770 from ASRock, and I’ve also got my ASRock Phantom gaming widescreen display here, which we used for a fair bit of our testing. We’Ve also tested competing products from Nvidia and AMD.
It’S also been some price cuts. At least it seems like there’s been some price Cuts can’t get any official confirmation from that, but both Micro Center, Newegg and Amazon are reflecting some pretty steep price discounts on the a770 and the a770 is a car that should be roughly in line sort of kinda. With, like you know, the 6700 and Nvidia is still stuck in there. Uh 3000 Series. They haven’t, launched the 4000 series cards that cost around three hundred dollars four hundred dollars, something like that and the least expensive a770 that I’ve seen has been below 300 dollars.
250. Is that on the table 220 – I don’t know, but at those kind of prices yeah it looks pretty good on paper, but what’s the real world experience what’s the breakdown? Well, fortunately, we’ve got our data from the last time we tested the a770 around launch. Well, a little after launch, because ASRock made some tweaks and improvements.
Their version of the card supports some really interesting things in terms of overclocking and the board itself, and so on and so forth. But uh I mean just look at that card design. It looks.
It looks sort of familiar right now I got some feeling that uh ASRock might be reusing a couple of components here with their Phantom gaming Intel arcline. I mean to be sure the box is fancy and again xcss, but when we look at a breakdown of gaming performance, especially with older AAA titles and newer AAA titles, the performance really is pretty interesting. So for testing I tried to do real world playthroughs, and the reason for that is because I had some unsettling things happen when I was revisiting this in terms of performance on paper.
The performance seemed really good, but the real world experience with the GPU was sort of strange, so Borderlands, 3 Borderlands 3 definitely had the largest performance increase. It’S 33 FPS higher 1080P and 25 FPS higher at 1440p. The one percent and the 0.1 percent low is also increased significantly, meaning that the gameplay experience is overall, very smooth. I wish that I’d started the play testing with 4 Borderlands 3, because that would have given me a lot more confidence for the rest of the games.
Basically, everything was working according to plan and Borderlands 3.. That’S really good! Shout out to the Tomb Raider we always kind of use that as a baseline, it really didn’t improve much. In fact, it’s pretty much the same shadow of the Tomb Raider with the launch day. Drivers they couldn’t really improve them.
I have a feeling, that’s one of the games that got the most attention, because literally every Reviewer is testing shot of the Tomb Raider, even though it’s a four billion year old game at this point with The Arc GPU, I’m not really sure that it’s representative of Real world average performance, maybe you have to randomly choose a game in testing. I don’t know it’s something that we have to be careful of when we’re testing and reviewing cars, because the performance is not necessarily consistent or the same or at least hey new drivers are launching. Everything is dramatically improved, not so on Shadow of the Tomb Raider except the one percent and the 0.1 percent lows were much better.
So that’s good again. The 0.1 percent low is a 1440p were over twice as high with the new drivers, meaning that somebody was looking at this and saying. Ah yes, there was some stuttering here. Let’S do this, but it was kind of at odds with what I remember, because when I remember playing shadow of the Tomb Raider, I remember thinking uh. The performance here isn’t super awesome.
But then, when I looked at the averages it was like well, the average is basically the same. Why do I have this memory that shadow of the Tomb Raider wasn’t any good and then it kind of dawned on me as we did more testing? Oh, the reason it didn’t feel like it was performing well was because the frame rate was so inconsistent and now that the frame rate is much more consistent on the newer drivers, it really does feel better and that’s not something that we really quantify with charts and Graphs when we’re presenting these cards – and so that’s why I wanted to do this video it’s like this is a very subtle thing that you have to look for and and see if it’s discussed and the Intel team should be lauded here, because they’ve obviously done a Lot of work, even with shadow of the Tomb Raider and a relatively ancient game, to improve things since launch day. Even if you look at the averages – and you say – oh, the averages really haven’t moved much. The Real World gameplay experience, I assure you – has moved significantly since launch day, similar stories from Deus Ex 21 average FPS higher 1080P and 16 higher at 1440p, but the 0.1 percent lows again were almost twice as high, so they fixed the General in performance and they Also fix their stuttering in 0.1 percent lows, which is fabulous. Cyberpunk 2077 saw the least Improvement overall, with the exception of Halo infinite, which we’ll talk about in a minute.
It’S kind of disappointing because cyberpunk 2077, I think, is getting kind of a second life in post-release. Hate, has kind of died down and they’ve added some more stuff and fixed a lot of bugs in the game itself, so yeah. Okay, that makes sense.
I think you can get by with cyberpunk 2077 at the lower quality settings you shouldn’t have to do that unless this card is coming in at a significantly lower price point now. Halo, infinite is an interesting case study because you kind of step back and you look into the world of gpus four games and gpus to work well together, the game studio and the hardware vendor pretty much have to work together. You can’t just follow the DirectX standard. There will be the idealists among you who say: no, if you just Implement Vulcan or you just implement the standards or you just do this.
It will work perfectly, but that’s sort of a very naive unlearned position depending on how the game is built and what particular state of the art the game was pushing at the time that it was built. It won’t be the case that the game is using a perfect reference implementation of anything. It won’t be the case that the the game is using the driver, exactly as it was in the run-up to launch a lot of the times the developers have to do Herculean things and move mountains and figure stuff out a lot of the times.
The reasons the game drivers are so large is you have these Engineers inside companies like Nvidia and AMD in a graphics division that look at the game, figure out what the game is doing wrong and then they’ll do runtime binary patch, which is literally taking the game As it exists and sort of modifying how the game does stuff with the GPU driver to make it slightly different, so it might do things in a different order or there might be a conditional in the driver. That’S you know: if player is playing, Halo, infinite, expect things to come in this order, reroute them into this order in terms of how we actually do it on Hardware, so they do some optimizations. Now they may communicate that back to the game company or that may just be something they build into the actual game Driver and looking at those drivers from kind of a Point.
Blank Range to understand what the drivers are doing and why the driver needs to know what specific game that you’re playing, not just an API. This isn’t just Vulcan: it’s not just DirectX 11, it’s not just DirectX 12., but what’s going on with the game, then you sort of begin to understand the challenges that Intel faces. And so then we look at Halo, infinite, Halo, infinite is actually a really fun game. I played all the way through the campaign and it’s really super disappointing – that uh AI, not a Halo Aficionado, can sort of see what the Halo fans are talking about when they complain about the 343 Studios and the terrible mess that Halo multiplayer is and like when You’Ve screwed up that badly that casual, Rando, Halo player is saying.
Well, you guys should probably work on that um you’ve messed up pretty badly, but also that’s. Why Halo, I think, doesn’t have a huge player base right now, and that also means. I think that it’s not getting a lot of attention from companies like Intel where they look at it and they say there’s something wrong with this implementation or possibly, 343 Studios did something really Herculean under the hood to make Halo infinite as good as it is, but That was sort of in the state of things as they were on launch day and drivers and everything else have moved on since launch day and certainly doesn’t seem like anybody on the original Halo. Dev team is paying attention and the individual driver companies and that sort of thing that are working on those those components AMD Intel Nvidia.
I don’t seem to be able to fix a lot of things either. It runs the best on Nvidia, a Halo infinite. At this point, which seems kind of weird, because I think it was an amb launch title wasn’t it is that is that you can the engagement, challenging sort of correct me on that and let me know but um, it’s sort of a it’s sort of a strange Situation when you look at it and oh boy, does the Intel Arc GPU have a whole host of problems in addition to the game just randomly crashing when you actually play it, uh uh there’s a lot of strange visual artifacts. A lot of strange things happening, the birds aren’t real JJ, a Bruce lens effect.
Ah, don’t you know, Birds aren’t real, so Halo, infinite being as much of a mess as it is, I think, is an Exemplar for what you can expect if the game that you’re trying to play is particularly obscure, not well supported, maybe people aren’t checking it. I’M surprised that Halo, infinite would be considered obscure and that people aren’t checking it in this day and age. But it seems obvious that it’s just simply not actually being checked or tested or or something that’s very odd. Going on with Microsoft and the game studios, and maybe it’s some kind of tantrum, because they can’t acquire Activision or something on the Microsoft side. I don’t I don’t know, but when you encounter these kind of problems, the game studio and Intel are gon na have to work together to solve the issue to make it go away. So the gamers can enjoy the gaming experience or or open source the game, because that’s also completely an option.
Just let the community fix it get out of the way that works, see also quick, three and doom and other doom, and then the later version of Doom and a bunch of Doom games. It’S software, they did it right now. Intel has the development Force Intel is the 800 pound gorilla in this room in Intel probably has a larger and more competent overall development staff than Nvidia and AMD combined and that’s not a knock against either one there’s a lot of talented people inside Nvidia and AMD Working on these kinds of things, it’s just that Intel is so extremely been there done that that I think instead, the takeaway that you should have from this is not. They need to spend more resources on this, but the GPU development is hard even outside the hardware.
The software is just as much or more important than the hardware and I’m sure that AMD users can attest to that as well, because the AMD gpus have had their fair share of driver issues as well over time, but as AMD has grown as a company. They really seem to have done a good job being good stewards of their driver team. Maybe you disagree again engagement challenge, but from my vantage point it sure seems like that, as AMD has sold more gpus and put more work into their gpus that they have been good stewards of the developers working on those things working on Open Standards. I mean Hello GPU open if it wasn’t for GPU, open X ESS, which again is probably the best thing to come out of the Intel Arc. Drivers probably wouldn’t have been a thing we probably wouldn’t have xcess in as many games as we do right now today. Without AMD sort of putting pressure on Everybody by saying look at this awesome cool stuff, we’re doing a GPU open, you can bring into any game. You want! That’S really really cool stuff on the Intel arc side, if you’re willing to put up with a few warts and you sort of go into it with open eyes, knowing that some games might be problematic, Halo, infinite in particular at the top of that list. Right now, although people noticing and complaining about it, probably going to get that fixed again engagement, challenge check for recent comments, Halo, infinite! If that’s your thing, but a lot of games actually did perform really well. Fortnite performed really well. Unless you exceeded the eight gigs of vram and then it crashed for mysterious reasons again, that’s probably just housekeeping issues inside the driver, but generally for Esports titles and popular titles and GTA, and not only is the overall gaming experience pretty good if you’re on one of Those you know, let’s call them popular titles, but with the driver releases of the last couple of weeks month or so things for a770 users have improved dramatically.
So if you wanted to save 50 100 on a GPU, it wouldn’t be a bad choice, because Intel is sort of punching above their weight class with some little things that may or may not get ironed out in the driver side of things. The hardware itself does seem pretty solid and it does seem like most of these issues are down to software issues, and you know just collaboration and communication is needed between the game, company and Intel, of course think about it from a game company perspective as well. Your developers are a finite resource. They only have so much time. Who are you going to put all your time into well you’re, going to put all your time into whoever sells the most gpus. Obviously, and then you have not one but two other choices, so you’re probably going to choose the one that is the most bang for the buck, the most players, the least headache to implement something like that.
And that means that the company – that’s you – know, sort of the lowest company on the totem. Pole is going to have to spend even more money and even more resources to try to make up that deficiency on their own, and this is a real challenge that Intel faces. I like, where they’re going with their gpus. I, like the performance of the a770, and I like what azerock has put together but understand that if you buy one of these even now, you know well after launch that not everything is going to be perfect and some things are quite far from perfect.
But it’s a deal I’m one of this level one. This has been a revisit of the arc a770 and the performance that the driver updates have brought, and just some of my thoughts on the GPU industry and that sort of thing again, the more people making affordable, gpus the lower the prices will be overall. Gamers need that Gamers really really need that, but will this be a hugely profitable Cash Cow for Intel? In the end, I don’t know the jury’s out on that one. I’M signing out.
You find me the level one forms .