Intel Arc 380 video card disappoints in first reviews – Computer – News

Well… hate to say “I told you so” but… “I told you so”. I made the argument that Intel is very good at building hardware, but not so good at building drivers (for gaming GPUs). The counter argument I heard is that Intel is one of the oldest GPU builders out there. And while I agree, I disagreed in the context of these GPUs. These GPUs do exactly what the current Intel IGPs do well, and they also do well. There is nothing to argue with.

What you suddenly notice is that Intel doesn’t understand game optimization very well. That means that they specifically don’t have all the legacy of 20+ years of ‘working’ video games in their driver, and the layers between Vulkan, DX12, pre-direct hardware (DX11 or 12d11) STILL (read the STILL) understanding.

There’s a reason the green and red drivers are so absurdly large (and though one factor is GeForce Experience — which I’d love to see nVidia start offering drivers without it…). It’s full of patches, nuances, and hacks. Because game developers use patches, nuances, and hacks to build faster/better/cheaper games. How long have some games had ‘blinking shadows’ as a known issue in the GeForce 470-490 series of drivers? How long has VR been broken?

You can see Intel currently working pretty well when no memory needs to be used (it sounds crazy, but the reason nVidia and AMD remain consistent without a resize bar is more a trick with smart memory filling than Intel’s performance with resize bar is a picture of inefficiency). Resize bar is a solution to a problem that PCIe (and even AGP before that with that separate 8-bit bus to the CPU next to the 32-bit main bus) has been around for a long time (and where AMD/nVIdia had tricks for that). You also see Intel working fairly reasonably in new DX12 games. And that clearly shows what the focus is of team Blauw… First ‘current’, then the legacy (if they do it at all because it’s just like Wine/Proton currently in business, every handy trick of a dev on inventing a niche game and making sure the driver can handle it well is sometimes not rewarding). That’s why you see DX11 games really cooked on Arc.

Games are extremely sensitive to trends. AMD and nVidia have been working for a long time to release a driver that specifically works well on a specific game (if they don’t work directly with the devs at all), and include those patches in the next driver version, and so a driver has ~ 20 years worth of patches in them sometimes. Games, however, follow a sort of Rogers curve. They know an early minority, majority, mainstream, and then they usually disappear (before the next). Occasionally a game hangs for a long time (Blizzard usually does that well, although they also usually evolve the games to a point where they no longer resemble how they once were in terms of tech, sometimes content as well). But most games quickly become niche.

Intel is in a difficult dilemma with that… but they show that they do what they do… but for mainstream use I think it needs a few more generations.

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