Has Intel mentioned anything about the long term future for driver updates and support for Arc? It seems like these things are more or less abandoned by the company since they've been out long enough that it's reasonable to have expected Intel to release a follow-up generational improvement of their dGPUs based on when Arc first hit the market. It notably doesn't seem as though that's the case so this critter looks a lot like a single generation technological dead end which is unfortunate since the other two companies are focused quite heavily on huge, hot, power-hungry designs.
Not at all abandoned. Driver updates every few weeks for nearly the entire year. The last one added Starfield support and fixed numerous bugs. The irony is Starfield has less issues on Intel ARC than on AMD Radeon (where the sun still has a glitch in the non-beta drivers) so Intel is doing well. I still have issues on my A770 in Battlefield with freesync (basically makes tearing worse) so I have it set to 100hz and VSYNC on, or a 100FPS cap, the card handles this fine at 1080p on my i7-12700k. But Battlefield was really built with RTX cards in mind - AMD cards seem artificially nerfed in BF2042 compared to other games. Such is the industry.
When Starfield hit, Intel's ARC wasn't able to launch the game. While there are some bugs on the AMD side at launch, they were less significant than what Intel's were.
Yeah, I have no idea why someone would have the impression that Intel abandoned Arc. They have released as many "good" driver updates this year as either NVIDIA or AMD, if not more. By good, I mean ones that not only have usual bug fixes and new game profiles, but also have 10-40% performance improvements in titles or even whole ranges of APIs. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Battlemage will be even more competitive with AMD and NVIDIA, because when there is good alternatives to them, everyone wins :)
Intel finally got into a good pace and quality of releases. If driver support was like it is today at ARC's launch, the impression of that hardware would be radically different. I would argue that Intel is still behind both AMD and nVidia here but not embarrassingly so like it was at launch.
The real boon for Intel is that the A750 and A770 are occupying a space that both AMD and nVidia are currently avoiding. Both of those companies want the baseline price for graphics cards to increase. Intel can sweep in and take market share as long as AMD and nVidia are ignoring demand for lower priced cards.
Well actually, that was my mistake. Arc's been talked about for what felt like a long-ish time, but it looks as though last summer was when the first desktop GPUs were released so it's certainly not unreasonable in Intel's known release schedule for an early 2024 launch if they intend to release a new generation. At the moment, I'm still concerned, but if a new iteration is released before next summer, that would be reassuring.
I have an A380 in my BlueIris NVR, it supports CodeProject.AI great. I tried it with DeepStack at the beginning of the year when I first got the card and it was basically unsupported (and DeepStack is being shelved it seems) so seeing CodeProject.AI support it is fantastic news considering its power budget and price compared to...everything else.
The best thing nobody seems to talk about with ARC is its headless operation is very good. Intel seems to have considered it as a dual-purpose product from the beginning and it's idle consumption when running as a non-primary "display" controller is fantastic - <10w.
But the primary reason to consider ARC for DVR\NVR is just what is mentioned in this article: encoding\decoding. And it has another advantage no other GPU's offer, a feature only ever offered in Intel CPU's: QuickSync. And its crazy. I tested the A380 with BlueIris before I switched it's purpose to CodeProject.AI analysis and it could encode 10 (the most cameras I have available) at 8MP (~4K) 15FPS video streams in H265 and it was only at 60% load peak, usually around 40%, really depended on motion. But the CPU utilization (my DVR is a Intel i7-8700) was like 5% and the GPU was not used at all - QuickSync was entirely run through the GPU. What's amazing about this is the power consumption was around half of what it was to run the equivalent load on the CPU alone, not to mention the GPU is cheaper than a CPU for this purpose. You could throw an A380 in a cheap Pentium Gold PC and run BlueIris to encode nearly 20 4K primary H265 IP Camera streams using under 100w of power, assuming you aren't using any AI analysis.
Matrox severely nerfed the Luma A310 to get it passively cooled, capped at 30W down from 50W, 1750MHz Base & Boost clock. While commendable, the implementation is pretty weak and the heatsink simply isn't large enough if you plan to actually load up the GPU.
"Less issues" as in the only graphics card that was pretty much unusable at launch because both AMD and Nvidia got their driver fixes out before launch and Intel, well, didn't. And to be honest, at least with Nvidia it ran mostly fine even with months old drivers and this is a AMD sponsored title so there's really no excuse for Intel to be that late to the party. But as you correctly note Intel did finally release a driver update. And Intel Battlemage appears to be on schedule for it's 2024 launch and intel has been very clear on their long-term commitment (the initial poster clearly hasn't been paying attention).
ASRock's low profile A380 is currently going for $120, and this card has 2/3 the RAM (capacity and bandwidth) and 3/4 the "XMX Engines", so the A310 should be around $80-90 if the price scales linearly with the performance.
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PeachNCream - Thursday, September 14, 2023 - link
Has Intel mentioned anything about the long term future for driver updates and support for Arc? It seems like these things are more or less abandoned by the company since they've been out long enough that it's reasonable to have expected Intel to release a follow-up generational improvement of their dGPUs based on when Arc first hit the market. It notably doesn't seem as though that's the case so this critter looks a lot like a single generation technological dead end which is unfortunate since the other two companies are focused quite heavily on huge, hot, power-hungry designs.Samus - Thursday, September 14, 2023 - link
Not at all abandoned. Driver updates every few weeks for nearly the entire year. The last one added Starfield support and fixed numerous bugs. The irony is Starfield has less issues on Intel ARC than on AMD Radeon (where the sun still has a glitch in the non-beta drivers) so Intel is doing well. I still have issues on my A770 in Battlefield with freesync (basically makes tearing worse) so I have it set to 100hz and VSYNC on, or a 100FPS cap, the card handles this fine at 1080p on my i7-12700k. But Battlefield was really built with RTX cards in mind - AMD cards seem artificially nerfed in BF2042 compared to other games. Such is the industry.Kevin G - Monday, September 18, 2023 - link
When Starfield hit, Intel's ARC wasn't able to launch the game. While there are some bugs on the AMD side at launch, they were less significant than what Intel's were.Jorgp2 - Friday, September 15, 2023 - link
They're still providing updates to their Gen 9.5 GPUs, at least periodically.Intel has much better software support than AMD.
NextGen_Gamer - Friday, September 15, 2023 - link
Yeah, I have no idea why someone would have the impression that Intel abandoned Arc. They have released as many "good" driver updates this year as either NVIDIA or AMD, if not more. By good, I mean ones that not only have usual bug fixes and new game profiles, but also have 10-40% performance improvements in titles or even whole ranges of APIs. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Battlemage will be even more competitive with AMD and NVIDIA, because when there is good alternatives to them, everyone wins :)Kevin G - Monday, September 18, 2023 - link
Intel finally got into a good pace and quality of releases. If driver support was like it is today at ARC's launch, the impression of that hardware would be radically different. I would argue that Intel is still behind both AMD and nVidia here but not embarrassingly so like it was at launch.The real boon for Intel is that the A750 and A770 are occupying a space that both AMD and nVidia are currently avoiding. Both of those companies want the baseline price for graphics cards to increase. Intel can sweep in and take market share as long as AMD and nVidia are ignoring demand for lower priced cards.
PeachNCream - Tuesday, September 19, 2023 - link
Well actually, that was my mistake. Arc's been talked about for what felt like a long-ish time, but it looks as though last summer was when the first desktop GPUs were released so it's certainly not unreasonable in Intel's known release schedule for an early 2024 launch if they intend to release a new generation. At the moment, I'm still concerned, but if a new iteration is released before next summer, that would be reassuring.meacupla - Thursday, September 14, 2023 - link
If it's like any of the other A310, it should be around 50WSamus - Friday, September 15, 2023 - link
I have an A380 in my BlueIris NVR, it supports CodeProject.AI great. I tried it with DeepStack at the beginning of the year when I first got the card and it was basically unsupported (and DeepStack is being shelved it seems) so seeing CodeProject.AI support it is fantastic news considering its power budget and price compared to...everything else.The best thing nobody seems to talk about with ARC is its headless operation is very good. Intel seems to have considered it as a dual-purpose product from the beginning and it's idle consumption when running as a non-primary "display" controller is fantastic - <10w.
But the primary reason to consider ARC for DVR\NVR is just what is mentioned in this article: encoding\decoding. And it has another advantage no other GPU's offer, a feature only ever offered in Intel CPU's: QuickSync. And its crazy. I tested the A380 with BlueIris before I switched it's purpose to CodeProject.AI analysis and it could encode 10 (the most cameras I have available) at 8MP (~4K) 15FPS video streams in H265 and it was only at 60% load peak, usually around 40%, really depended on motion. But the CPU utilization (my DVR is a Intel i7-8700) was like 5% and the GPU was not used at all - QuickSync was entirely run through the GPU. What's amazing about this is the power consumption was around half of what it was to run the equivalent load on the CPU alone, not to mention the GPU is cheaper than a CPU for this purpose. You could throw an A380 in a cheap Pentium Gold PC and run BlueIris to encode nearly 20 4K primary H265 IP Camera streams using under 100w of power, assuming you aren't using any AI analysis.
ZoZo - Friday, September 15, 2023 - link
I'm assuming that it comes with a normal profile bracket?Also, how is it not passively cooled? Matrox has a passively cooled one.
Samus - Saturday, September 16, 2023 - link
Matrox severely nerfed the Luma A310 to get it passively cooled, capped at 30W down from 50W, 1750MHz Base & Boost clock. While commendable, the implementation is pretty weak and the heatsink simply isn't large enough if you plan to actually load up the GPU.TLindgren - Friday, September 15, 2023 - link
"Less issues" as in the only graphics card that was pretty much unusable at launch because both AMD and Nvidia got their driver fixes out before launch and Intel, well, didn't. And to be honest, at least with Nvidia it ran mostly fine even with months old drivers and this is a AMD sponsored title so there's really no excuse for Intel to be that late to the party.But as you correctly note Intel did finally release a driver update. And Intel Battlemage appears to be on schedule for it's 2024 launch and intel has been very clear on their long-term commitment (the initial poster clearly hasn't been paying attention).
Xajel - Friday, September 15, 2023 - link
We need a full height but single slot as well.nfriedly - Tuesday, September 19, 2023 - link
ASRock's low profile A380 is currently going for $120, and this card has 2/3 the RAM (capacity and bandwidth) and 3/4 the "XMX Engines", so the A310 should be around $80-90 if the price scales linearly with the performance.skinnyelephant - Saturday, September 30, 2023 - link
Only rerget is that it does not fit ones desire to run games at least 1080p 60fps .