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Intel Arc series unveiled with the Alchemist dGPU to arrive in Q1 2022

looking at synthetic bench it beats out the 6400, but loses in games, does suggest drivers. The baton of bad drivers is looking like it's been passed to Intel, though early days, give it time, Intel bound to **** it up even more
 
I hoped for a lot better than this effort from Intel but they hired a guy notorious for over promising and under delivering. Even with Intel's money he's created another lacklustre offering that no-one in their right mind would buy if current performance and power usage figures are to be believed. Hopefully Intel will hire someone who knows what they're doing for their next effort as this looks like a complete waste of time and money. It's a shame as I can't see anything to shake AMD and Nvidia from their cosy duopoly for at least another two or three years.
 
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Angilion said:
Would I be right in thinking that's probably indicative of bad drivers? Which would be far from surprising for Intel graphics drivers.
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Potentially? Certainly!

However, imagine those synthetics were a CPU benchmark in the age of speculative execution. Well, unlike actual games the workload is very predictably so if with a CPU you could give it hints about what is happening next, then you'd gain an advantage.

For GPUs, maybe a fixed workload like synth benchmarks enables them to pre-load their shaders etc. in a certain way which rarely happens in an interactive game?

Or they just need to do the same for the shaders etc. for actual games. That's the more hopeful though for them being able to eventually fix some of their gaming issues - however it does imply that they currently have thrown a lot of resources at winning in synth benchmarks. And "winning" in synths usually means the consumer losses. Basically cheating at synthetics cannot really be painted in a good light even if all the vendors do it.
 
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KompuKare said:
Potentially? Certainly!

However, imagine those synthetics were a CPU benchmark in the age of speculative execution. Well, unlike actual games the workload is very predictably so if with a CPU you could give it hints about what is happening next, then you'd gain an advantage.

For GPUs, maybe a fixed workload like synth benchmarks enables them to pre-load their shaders etc. in a certain way which rarely happens in an interactive game?

Or they just need to do the same for the shaders etc. for actual games. That's the more hopeful though for them being able to eventually fix some of their gaming issues - however it does imply that they currently have thrown a lot of resources at winning in synth benchmarks. And "winning" in synths usually means the consumer losses. Basically cheating at synthetics cannot really be painted in a good light even if all the vendors do it.
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I'm no longer up to date on PC hardware in any detail at all, but the impression I get is that it's still true that cheating so blatantly gets noticed. Rigging things to inflate specific benchmark numbers is too obvious to avoid scrutiny unless the product isn't getting any attention at all. It's done, of course, and has been for as long as I remember. But it gets noticed and it's bad PR. Businesses do it either because decisions are routinely made by people who don't care about anything more than very short term things they can claim credit for and/or profit from (via bonuses, promotion, a change of jobs, whatever) or because the people at a decision-making level decide that the increased sales from their deception will outweigh the bad PR from their deception and thus be of overall benefit to the company. But it still gets noticed because it's so obvious. In many cases it's so blatant that all that's needed to uncover it is renaming a single executable!

It's not just PC hardware, of course. Samsung (and probably other manufacturers) has done it with TVs and "phones"(*) and the most famous recent example is VW's "optimisation" for emissions testing. That one backfired on them, though. It seems that the practice isn't as accepted in other industries.



* I dislike calling a networked computer that is sometimes used to run a phone app a phone. It's like calling a car a shelf because sometimes people put things on a car. Or calling a PC a phone because it's sometimes used to run a phone app.
 
Turns out just about everyone was doing the VW thing to at least some extent.

The problem with a lot of things these days, Including PC hardware, if its possible to cheat in a way that gives you a marketing advantage its almost expected of you to do so, because you can't be the only one not doing it, no one will thank you for it and people will just assume your stuff isn't that good, its like, everyone cheats, so none cheats, and if you're not cheating, you're a fool.
 
humbug said:
The problem with a lot of things these days, Including PC hardware, if its possible to cheat in a way that gives you a marketing advantage its almost expected of you to do so, because you can't be the only one not doing it, no one will thank you for it and people will just assume your stuff isn't that good, its like, everyone cheats, so none cheats, and if you're not cheating, you're a fool.
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Now, I tend to naively think the cheating, we must win at all costs thing, and generally excessively aggressive PR all started with the green graphic vendor company but they are probably just the most obvious one who just stand out with their practices.
 
humbug said:
Turns out just about everyone was doing the VW thing to at least some extent.

The problem with a lot of things these days, Including PC hardware, if its possible to cheat in a way that gives you a marketing advantage its almost expected of you to do so, because you can't be the only one not doing it, no one will thank you for it and people will just assume your stuff isn't that good, its like, everyone cheats, so none cheats, and if you're not cheating, you're a fool.
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Well it backfired for Nvidia in 2003.
 
Well it's not all bad.
With little else to Sh[r]out about, he is able to boast about AV1 encoding, and that the card's build quality is high. Or since he's photographed the box, maybe only the box has the exceptional build quality.:D

And while we all though the value was poor, do we actually appreciate that your getting Genuine Intel™©® for that price? :D
 
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