As part of an open question and answer session, Intel addressed the current situation of the Arc graphics cards, which have been criticized in many places, on its gaming blog by Lisa Pearce, Vice President and General Manager of the Visual Compute Group Based on the first generation Xe HPG (“Alchemist”) and its drivers and features.
Intel talks a lot and says little new
Under the title “Engineering Arc”, Lisa Pearce has answered the first, sometimes critical, questions about the manufacturer's first generation of Arc graphics cards. Among other things, the manager commented on the sometimes serious performance differences in games under DirectX 9, 11 and 12 as well as the free graphics API Vulkan, which the editors also attested to the Intel Arc A380 (test), and the complex problems with the partially graphics driver, which is still very unfinished, and the Resizable BAR PCIe extension.
- Why does Intel Arc GPU performance vary between DX11 and DX12 titles?< /li>
- What is Resizable BAR and why is it important for Intel Arc GPUs?
- I've read reports that Intel's driver isn't ready yet. What is the status?
- Do Intel Arc GPUs support VRR display technologies?
In some cases, however, the manager also referred to older ones Statements made by Tom Petersen and Ryan Shrout in the Q&A “How to think about Intel Arc graphics with DirectX 12, Vulkan, and older APIs?”
The whole point is that DX11 and older APIs require both Microsoft's and Intel's software a lot of abstractions that simplify game development. That makes sense.
For DX9, Intel uses a DX9on12 mapping layer that maps graphics commands from DX9 to DX12. We conduct extensive compatibility and performance testing and work closely with Microsoft and ISVs to continuously improve this solution.
We expect to close the gap to DX11 performance over time, which will be an advantage when future drivers are introduced.
Lisa Pearce, Vice President and General Manager, Visual Compute Group
Resizable BAR should be active by default
Intel considers Resizable BAR, which brought gamers back into focus over the past year with AMD Smart Access Memory (test), as essential for the performance of its graphics cards and recommends that gamers and its partners enable the PCIe feature by default.
Intel Arc GPUs are optimized to work with larger memory transactions, so enabling ReBAR is essential for achieving peak performance in Arc essential.
We encourage our motherboard partners to enable ReBAR by default, and we expect future chipsets to continue to support this feature.
Lisa Pearce, Vice President and General Manager, Visual Compute Group
For more information on enabling Resizable BAR, the Intel manager referred to the Intel Arc Quick Start Guide.
The graphics driver should get better over time
Lisa Pearce goes on to explain that the start of Alchemist and especially that of the graphics driver was “bumpy”, but Intel, for example, “4 of 43 issues” reported by Gamers Nexus would have been resolved by the end of July. There are also a total of 21 UI issues that have since been fixed.
We continue to learn what we must do to be successful. Some of the issues were related to our installer and the way it downloads individual components after the initial install.
This allows us to have a smaller initial download so that users can get started faster. However, unexpected errors make this process unreliable, and later this year we will move to a combined package that downloads and installs in one step.
Lisa Pearce, Vice President and General Manager, Visual Compute Group
Finally, Pearce confirmed AMD FreeSync support, basic G-Sync compatibility and support for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR).
Many of these points were also addressed in detail by Tom Petersen and Ryan Shrout in the Intel Arc Graphics A&A.