Intel Arc GPUs are delayed mainly because of the ARC GPU drivers not being ready yet. Without proper software support, the GPUs won’t give the expected performance output. Although Arc A380 has been released in China, Intel is waiting for the drivers to mature enough to be released in other parts of the world.
Well, the good news is that Intel has released a brand new Graphics beta driver 30.0.101.1743 for its Arc GPU lineup. This driver has a new feature toggle for “Advanced Performance Optimizations”. Those are special benchmark-specific optimizations that boost Intel ARC GPU performance in synthetic tests.
This feature can be toggled through the Arc Control Panel and it is set to improve the performance in synthetic benchmarks such as 3DMark Time Spy and 3DMark Port Royal. The drivers will also support the Arc Alchemist A770M and A550M GPUs.
On top of that, there is Game On Driver support for Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak*, F1 2022*, and Arcadegeddon* on Intel® Arc™ A-Series Graphics.
The official highlights according to Intel are:
- Support for Intel® Arc™ A770M and A550M Graphics (Codename Alchemist).
- Intel® Game On Driver support for Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak*, F1 2022*, and Arcadegeddon* on Intel® Arc™ A-Series Graphics.
- Advanced Performance Optimizations: A new feature now available within Arc Control that allows users to select and enable advanced application optimizations. The initial implementation of the feature only affects 3DMark Timespy and 3DMark Port Royale. Integrated graphics performance, as well as discrete GPU game and content creation applications, will see no performance impact from the disabling of the optimizations.
The initial Arc GPUs showed promising results in synthetic benchmark tests although the results failed to translate into actual gaming performance. The GPUs had APO turned on by default which boosted synthetic test results while compromising gaming performance. With the option to turn APO off, we can see more accurate synthetic as well as gaming test results for Arc GPUs.
A Twitter user 0x22h provided numbers for the tests conducted on A380. The TimeSpy graphic tests resulted in 4449 points with APO disabled, a 15% decrease from the 5241 points with APO enabled.
The Port Royal ray tracing tests showed a decrease in scores of about 4% with APO turned off. This is more subtle than the big gap in TimeSpy test results.
With these, Intel’s showing off of their synthetic test results does not impress gamers anymore as they would much rather see the actual gaming performance which is still not competitive enough to battle the GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD.
Although the A380 does beat the recently released GTX 1630, it is still not that impressive against GTX 1650 or AMD RX 6400 which are older GPUs.
With Intel’s high-end models not being able to compete with NVIDIA and AMD’s upcoming next-gen GPUs, Intel should at least try to pull an advantage in the low-end market by improving its budget GPUs.
About Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, in Silicon Valley. It is the world’s largest semiconductor chip manufacturer on the basis of revenue, and is the developer of the x86 series of microprocessors – the processors found in most personal computers (PCs).
Incorporated in Delaware, Intel ranked No. 46 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.
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