INTEL ARC PREPS FOR A FLOOD
The big two GPU names are
about to get some much-
needed competition from
Intel’s Arc, or at least in
theory. Arc, formerly DG2, aka
Xe-HPG, has seen quite a few
delays. We originally thought
it would launch by the end
of 2021, but now it’s looking
like a mid-2022 launch for
the desktop parts. It could be
too little, too late for gamers,
though the media aspects of
the chips remain promising.
Intel recently revealed the
initial lineup for laptop Arc
A-series models, which will
inevitably be paired with Intel
CPUs. Given Intel dominates
the laptop landscape in
sales, it’s probably a smart
business move, but it doesn’t
give us a lot of hope for high
performance.
Intel compared its lower-
tier A370M part against
its own integrated Iris Xe
Graphics, from a Core i7-
1280P. That’s a 28W mobile
chip with 96 Execution Units
(now called XVE, for “Xe
Vector Engine”), going upagainst a 35–50W A370M
with 96 of the new XVEs.
Performance was over
50 percent faster, but our
previous testing suggests that
will be quite a bit slower than
even a GTX 1050.
The highest tier Arc chip,
A770M, will come with 512
XVEs and faster memory.
That’s 4096 shader cores
and a potential compute
performance of 13.5
TFLOPS FP32. Theoretical
performance isn’t the same as
real-world performance, but
even in a best-case scenario,
that puts the A770M on par
with Nvidia’s mobile RTX 3070.
Intel isn’t just talking
about graphics performance,
however. Arc also includes
XMX units (Xe Matrix
eXtensions), which are
basically Intel’s equivalent of
Nvidia’s Tensor cores. Each
XMX can perform 128 FP16
operations per clock, so the
A770M has a peak throughput
of 108 TFLOPS for deep
learning and AI acceleration.
Intel will be using the XMXengines for its XeSS (Xe
Super Sampling) upscaling
algorithm, which sounds a
lot like DLSS. XeSS will also
be able to run on DP4a (INT4)
hardware, for non-Arc GPUs
including AMD RDNA and
newer and Nvidia Pascal and
newer architectures.
Finally, Intel will include up
to 32 ray tracing units (RTU) in
its top Arc GPU. Unless Intel’s
RTUs are far more potent than
those of Nvidia or even AMD,we don’t expect much from
Team Blue when it comes to its
first generation of ray tracing
hardware. The lowest tier Arc
A350M for example has just
six RTUs clocked at 1150MHz,
with 4GB VRAM on a 64-bit
interface. Based on those
specs, it might make even the
RX 6500 XT look fast.
We’ll find out just how the
Arc chips stack up in the real
world in the coming months,
but we have a sinking feeling.Enabling resizable BAR support in
the motherboard BIOS as an example
caused the Radeon VII to refuse to even
POST (Power On Self-Test), even though
it doesn’t even have the hardware and
software support to benefit from the
feature. Disabling the settings (with a
different GPU installed) fixed that, which
is a configuration probably few if any
people will ever try. Overall, though, we
were pleased to see that we encountered
relatively few quirks.PLEASE CHECK YOUR DRIVERS
Driver support represents a potential
hiccup when trying to use an older
graphics card on Windows 11, or even
with Windows 10. AMD still has current
driver support for everything back to
its RX 400-series GPUs with its latest
drivers. That covers graphics cards from
Team Red dating back to 2016. What about
the older stuff, like the 300-series and
200-series parts from 2014 and 2013, or
even the newer R9 Fury family from 2015?Windows 11 will download drivers for
that hardware, but the last driver update
from AMD came in May 2021, so you may
encounter some incompatibilities with
more recent game releases.
Nvidia’s driver support extends further,
with the current release supporting
everything back to the GTX 900-series.
That means any GPU from Team Green
made in the past eight years should still
have support, and the GTX 700- and
600-series cards got a final driver release
last September—and a security patch
was released in January for those GPUs.
Conceivably, you could run a graphics
card from a decade ago on a modern PC
and it will still work...most of the time.
Of the games we tested, a few
complained about outdated drivers on
some of the legacy GPUs. Despite the
complaining, most of the games still ran
just fine, but Forza Horizon 5 failed to run
using the default drivers that Windows 11
installed. The solution was to download
the latest Windows 10 drivers, and then
the game ran fine.
Note that while there are still plenty of
people gaming on older CPUs, graphicsIntel will have two
main Arc chips, the
ACM-G10 and the
smaller ACM-G11.GPUs aren’t just for games, with
supercomputers using them
for weather simulations, deep
learning AI routines, and more.JUN 2022MAXIMU MPC 29
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