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

KompuKare · 21 Jul 2022 at 22:09

CuriousTomCat said:
The A380 looks like a nice little alternative to the 6400XT. I'm looking forward to seeing how the top tiers perform.

Aside from using more power. And a far larger die which should perform better. And being totally inconsistent in performance. Encoders and decodes AV1 though which might come in handy for uses. It's YouTube playback power usage was pretty poor though, so not the perfect media centre part.
But yes, certainly more "interesting" than an RX 6400 and the more people buy it, the more feedback Intel's driver team gets.

CuriousTomCat said:
It will take a couple of years to fix the drivers though so I'm out.

Wait, I though you said it was a nice alternative? Guess that doesn't meant you are going to buy one. Even not for science?

Vince · 21 Jul 2022 at 22:20

I'll probably buy one for science. Do we think it could possibly match the VII in my spare / wifes rig. Probably not but we shall see.

Miganto · 21 Jul 2022 at 22:30

If the top end is nearish to the 6700 (non xt) with less/similar power then i'll probably get one as they'll be lower priced and i'm ok getting a first gen of something - drivers will only improve over time.

Vince · 21 Jul 2022 at 22:58

Miganto said:
If the top end is nearish to the 6700 (non xt) with less/similar power then i'll probably get one as they'll be lower priced and i'm ok getting a first gen of something - drivers will only improve over time.

I think that might be wishfull thinking, if it beats a 3060 id be surprised. 6700xt is a bit faster than the 3060ti in raster so I don't see this part getting even close. Probably miles behind in more old school titles which tbh is all I really play. I've got a 6800xt in the main rig which tbh has been an awesome card. Never any issues and consistent great performance in anything old or new.

gpuerrilla · 21 Jul 2022 at 23:02

It may get near to the 6700 but will be nowhere near in efficiency and current driver set. Fair enough if you want to try them out though, I would wait on their next gen so the early issues can get addressed.

ASMB · 21 Jul 2022 at 23:06

My concern is how long, if ever, will it take for Intel to get around to sorting out the drivers in 15 year old games like LOTRO and how many games will be crashing due to bad drivers, not just have low frame rates. I hope that Intel get this sorted as I think we all welcome a third player in the gpu market

Hotwired · 21 Jul 2022 at 23:18

ASMB said:
My concern is how long, if ever, will it take for Intel to get around to sorting out the drivers in 15 year old games like LOTRO and how many games will be crashing due to bad drivers, not just have low frame rates. I hope that Intel get this sorted as I think we all welcome a third player in the gpu market

About 100 of the most critical older games are currently being done.

I expect as and when they feel like a particular game is embarrassing them they'll add and work on more. I expect many will never get worked on because the backlog is enormous.

Will be difficult to put a number on how badly this affects Intel not least because they specially noted any games that reviewers use for benchmarking will get flagged for improvements. So unless a reviewer decides to randomly choose "an old game" that Intel hasn't optimised yet they will find it hard to keep demonstrating it.

Vince · 21 Jul 2022 at 23:27

ASMB said:
My concern is how long, if ever, will it take for Intel to get around to sorting out the drivers in 15 year old games like LOTRO and how many games will be crashing due to bad drivers, not just have low frame rates. I hope that Intel get this sorted as I think we all welcome a third player in the gpu market

If you ever tried an old SIS Xabre 600 set that as the benchmark. A card on paper almost as good as what the competition had with drivers that made you want to cry. Did I buy one to have a play with, yes, yes i did. how bad was it... infuriating. The only game I ever got it to play especially well was Jedi Knight 2.

arknor · 22 Jul 2022 at 01:02

Hotwired said:
I expect as and when they feel like a particular game is embarrassing them they'll add and work on more. I expect many will never get worked on because the backlog is enormous.

a lot of games probably use the same engines though so fix one and you probably fix the others too?

Miganto · 22 Jul 2022 at 13:36

Vince said:
I think that might be wishfull thinking, if it beats a 3060 id be surprised. 6700xt is a bit faster than the 3060ti in raster so I don't see this part getting even close. Probably miles behind in more old school titles which tbh is all I really play. I've got a 6800xt in the main rig which tbh has been an awesome card. Never any issues and consistent great performance in anything old or new.

i said in brackets non xt, i'm not talking about the 6700xt

Miganto · 22 Jul 2022 at 13:40

gpuerrilla said:
It may get near to the 6700 but will be nowhere near in efficiency and current driver set. Fair enough if you want to try them out though, I would wait on their next gen so the early issues can get addressed.

Agreed but there will be many revisions of drivers on a new set of products, so progress there should be quick even though at the end of the 1st gen i'm still expecting them to not be anywhere near as good as amd/nvidia, it might be alright to take a punt on it as gaming isn't 50% of my life any more

I also see it that as i'm not a 'top ender', i can help by being another of those that buys into Intel. The more that do, the more chance they have of staying around and improving / iterating to, the longer that happens the more competition we have which should benefit us all. I really hope there isn't a boycotting of intel because they won't be as good, so that we can have a better gpu-war type future. I'm trying to think more long term for us all

Vince · 22 Jul 2022 at 14:16

Miganto said:
i said in brackets non xt, i'm not talking about the 6700xt

Reading comprehension is clearly not my strong point

KompuKare · 22 Jul 2022 at 14:41

Miganto said:
If the top end is nearish to the 6700 (non xt) with less/similar power then i'll probably get one as they'll be lower priced and i'm ok getting a first gen of something - drivers will only improve over time.

If...

While A770 is still an unknown, if Intel's own slides are real (leaked by wccftech) then they are actually surprisingly honest:

Leaked slide says that all Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs will cost less than $400

Wccftech has sourced a slide (below) that paints a rough picture of Alchemist's pricing, power consumption, and memory capacity. It was allegedly part of a presentation created...

www.techspot.com

So that implies that the A770 will be a bit faster than the plain RTX 3060 and the plain 6600, but uses as much power as the next full tier up. Actually 225W is pretty close the non-XT 6800.

From what we've seen so far, unless some driver miracle happens the performance implied in those slides are only if using a very selective set of games. I think Intel need to move their prices down one whole tier. And even <$300 for a card whose performance is game dependent but ranges from 6400 to 6600 XT is still no bargain.

CuriousTomCat · 22 Jul 2022 at 15:52

I'm really interested in the A750 and A770. Once Intel fix the driver issues they should age like fine wine for a potential 50% boost in DirectX 11 and older titles.

Pulseammo · 22 Jul 2022 at 16:39

In a recent LTT video they said something like the GPUs will be priced based on their "Tier 3" game performance... so does that mean to say that the A770 has almost 3060Ti performance in Tier 3 games, or Tier 1 games in the slide above?

Miganto · 22 Jul 2022 at 16:45

Vince said:
Reading comprehension us clearly not my strong point

But your humbleability (totally a word) is at 10 good sir

Miganto · 22 Jul 2022 at 16:49

KompuKare said:
If...

While A770 is still an unknown, if Intel's own slides are real (leaked by wccftech) then they are actually surprisingly honest:

Leaked slide says that all Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs will cost less than $400

Wccftech has sourced a slide (below) that paints a rough picture of Alchemist's pricing, power consumption, and memory capacity. It was allegedly part of a presentation created...

www.techspot.com

So that implies that the A770 will be a bit faster than the plain RTX 3060 and the plain 6600, but uses as much power as the next full tier up. Actually 225W is pretty close the non-XT 6800.

From what we've seen so far, unless some driver miracle happens the performance implied in those slides are only if using a very selective set of games. I think Intel need to move their prices down one whole tier. And even <$300 for a card whose performance is game dependent but ranges from 6400 to 6600 XT is still no bargain.

Well to me that looks either between 3060/3060 ti, or literally aiming it up, it's more like mostly a 3060ti with a smidge of 3060 (if we're doing a measuring contest!

) - i'm quite sure the 6650xt is below the 3060ti in performance by a few % and the 6070 (non xt) is at/above/below in different gaming tests, so i'm seeing the a770 as being very close to the 6700 (non XT) - so i'm still holding out hope it's at least just below a 6650xt on release and improvements in drivers over its lifetime bring it to a 6700.

175w for the 6700 and 225 for a770 is a big difference, what a shame. Let's see the price and the performance and make some decisions!

Quartz · 22 Jul 2022 at 16:58

KompuKare said:
And even <$300 for a card whose performance is game dependent but ranges from 6400 to 6600 XT is still no bargain.

Huh? ITYM under $150 for the 6400 competitor - the 8 GB A380. The A580 has yet to be tested and Intel expects performance between the 6500 XT and the 6600.

KompuKare said:
While A770 is still an unknown,

I suggest you look at the LTT video. He's using an A770 and at several points in-game framerates are shown.

KompuKare · 22 Jul 2022 at 17:00

Pretty sure it's for Tier1 (new or recent games), so for Tier 2 (oldies but still very popular) you can take the whole slide and slide the Intel section down one, while for Tier 3 (old classic games not as popular anymore) you slide it down two tiers. Something like this:

However, a 400mm² 6nm GPU with 16GB selling for $200 is a bit unlikely. If its performance for Tier 3 games is that bad, then maybe 16GB makes no sense, so they could save a bit on the BOM. The A310 might have to be a OEM "giveaway".

Pulseammo · 22 Jul 2022 at 17:11

Yeah see that's what makes it so curious. A 3060Ti is $369. If the A770 gets priced at $369, and that's for tier 1 performance only at 3060Ti level, then first of all the marketing in the Linus video was lies, and second it doesn't make it a compelling buy because the 3060Ti has driver maturity and solid performance across all game "tiers". On the other hand if they said they want $369 for it and it performs between a 3060 and a 3060Ti for Tier 3 games, but more like a 3080 in other games with better compatibility rolling out regularly then that gets a lot more tempting.