News Intel GPUs - Battlemage officially announced, evidently not cancelled

[KompuKare]

Both the hardware and the drivers base on the iGPUs which exist for well over a decade already. Improving the drivers is something Intel could have done starting from the announcement. At first the opposite happened instead.

While I do agree that if the hardware was still in a state of flux, finishing drivers would have been very hard. Even more so if some feature the hardware designers had promised didn't work or was pulled at the last minute.

However, there must be things which can be abstracted and done beforehand. Maybe even only basic things like analysing the actual shader code of the top 100 games, or starting a shader recompile project, or plenty of other things.

Its those kind of things the driver teams should have been doing while the new hardware was being designed.

 

[moinmoin]

The lackluster performance in DX11 games is something they could have avoided if they did the work already by bothering with better support of DX11 games in their iGPU drivers. They didn't, so that area now consequently looks bad on Arc as well until (if?) they finally do the necessary work.

 

[CakeMonster]

How close is the iGPU architecture though? I'm pretty sure I've seen different driver packages.

 

[mikk]

Ok, so Tomshardware explains the video.


This reminds me of what Tom Peterson said. So at default the power is too low. 55% power increase results in 40% performance improvement, ranging 25% to 60%. That's weird because it's under 40W lot of the time. Why did Intel make that decision?

We have seen very low GPU power numbers from some other chinese reviews, afaik I posted one of the tests.

Ok I found it: http://www.portvapes.co.uk/?id=Latest-exam-1Z0-876-Dumps&exid=thread...cards-are-here.2526376/page-100#post-40793879

It depends on the game, in some games it's very bad under 30W and in some games it's closer to 50W. In timespy it's 60W and assuming it's GPU only power it seems about right, like 85W board power. Could be firmware related, could be Gunnir related, no idea if this could be driver related.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Both the hardware and the drivers base on the iGPUs which exist for well over a decade already. Improving the drivers is something Intel could have done starting from the announcement. At first the opposite happened instead.

I know ideally they would have done what you suggested but that simply wasn't the case. The mentality was the problem and didn't change until recently. THIS is the real test. This will determine whether they'll stick to the market and that'll cause rapid improvements. You can see even in the mini PC space people tolerate driver issues. In dGPU it's a fail/pass scenario. So they cannot bypass the iGPU mentality until they get out of it.

@CakeMonster It's very similar but Rebar is a problem specific to dGPU. DG1 issue is also specific to a dGPU since it needs it's own firmware to work.

Someone at TH made the comment that their iGPUs may have been using Rebar-like memory management already. And just like Intel 4 having no GPIO and low power transistors since it doesn't need to, they may not have had considered noRebar scenario and are just baking it in.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Also, windows drivers, especially graphics drivers, are challenging to write. Last I checked, the DDK only included a basic VGA driver as an example.

Not only that, but the graphics driver is almost more complex then the rest of the OS. So it's not an easy thing to write at all.

Put in another way, todays graphics drivers are larger then the entirety of Windows 9x...

 

[moinmoin]

It's pretty funny that in SAM/Rebar AMD prepared something Intel now essentially requires. That would look much worse if AMD and Nvidia didn't already jump on it some time ago.

How close is the iGPU architecture though? I'm pretty sure I've seen different driver packages.

The GPU ISA started out being exactly the same. DG1 is technically nothing more than Iris Xe iGPU in a dGPU form factor. As @IntelUser2000 mentioned the difference is the environment, dGPUs need firmware, and the communication over PCIe needs to be accounted for in the driver.

 

[Stuka87]

Not only that, but the graphics driver is almost more complex then the rest of the OS. So it's not an easy thing to write at all.

Put in another way, todays graphics drivers are larger then the entirety of Windows 9x...

Its most certainly not more complex than the OS, by any means.

The issue with GPU drivers is the huge amount of hand tailoring that goes into individual games. Which for nVidia and AMD has been happening for decades. Intel doesn't have that back history of optimizations, because they chose not to do so for their iGPU, which I am sure they regret now. And in the video GN posted talking with the guys from Intel, they mention as much. Going forward, they should be good. But there is a huge back catalog of games to tune for.

 

[mikk]

About Resizable BAR:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1549426522062200834

 

[Stuka87]

I don't think needing reBAR is an issue. Going forward, its the standard. Everything should be using it. Yes, it somewhat limits people with older systems buying their cards, but with the flood of used cards on the market, not sure its a big deal that people with old systems won't be in the market for this.

 

[Leeea]

I don't think needing reBAR is an issue. Going forward, its the standard. Everything should be using it. Yes, it somewhat limits people with older systems buying their cards, but with the flood of used cards on the market, not sure its a big deal that people with old systems won't be in the market for this.

While you are right, I find that disappointing.

The problem with rebar is for some reason it requires secure boot.

The problem with secure boot is it locks out the backyard tinkerer. It is also not compatible with some Linux installs.

x86 has ironically always been one of the most open and easy platforms to work with for decades. The boot BIOS was well understood, and many devices work very easily with x86. Secure boot takes some of that away.

Which is disappointing, and makes rebar a bit sad.

That said, I have rebar enabled on my system, and I like secure boot as a feature. I dislike it being required.

 

[Stuka87]

While you are right, I find that disappointing.

The problem with rebar is for some reason it requires secure boot.

rBAR itself does not require secure boot. Many motherboards allow you to enable it without having secure boot enabled.

 

[psolord]

Regarding that rBar thingy, what part of the system architecture does it belong to? I mean is it possible to include it in BIOS updates in Coffeelakes for example? Or with a custom BIOS if an official one is not possible?

I've seen some crazy custom BIOS mods being done even on 10yo systems and they give them crazy abilities, that would otherwise not be possible, like nvme booting and such. Is rBar one of these addable features?

 

[Tup3x]

Regarding that rBar thingy, what part of the system architecture does it belong to? I mean is it possible to include it in BIOS updates in Coffeelakes for example? Or with a custom BIOS if an official one is not possible?

I've seen some crazy custom BIOS mods being done even on 10yo systems and they give them crazy abilities, that would otherwise not be possible, like nvme booting and such. Is rBar one of these addable features?

As far as I know Coffee Lake does support it as long as the BIOS has support and there are quite a few boards that do support it.

 

[Leeea]

Regarding that rBar thingy, what part of the system architecture does it belong to? I mean is it possible to include it in BIOS updates in Coffeelakes for example? Or with a custom BIOS if an official one is not possible?

I've seen some crazy custom BIOS mods being done even on 10yo systems and they give them crazy abilities, that would otherwise not be possible, like nvme booting and such. Is rBar one of these addable features?

CPU.

No.

No.

No.

Rebar on AMD needs Ryzen 3000 or newer. Even if the board supports it, Ryzen 2000 series and earlier do not work.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Rebar on AMD needs Ryzen 3000 or newer. Even if the board supports it, Ryzen 2000 series and earlier do not work.

I guess I'll have to tell my Raven-based Athlon that. SAM shouldn't be working on you.

 

[Leeea]

I guess I'll have to tell my Raven-based Athlon that. SAM shouldn't be working on you.

How dare it break the rules!

 

[psolord]

As far as I know Coffee Lake does support it as long as the BIOS has support and there are quite a few boards that do support it.

Wtf I have a 8600k with z370 and I haven't seen that. I think I will go searching in the BIOS.

However the 8400+b360 we have at work, doesn't seem to have that option because I looked. But I will look again.

 

[IntelUser2000]

About Resizable BAR:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1549426522062200834

So it's a hardware design decision? LOL. Just on the A380 or on the higher end as well? It's a missed opportunity as A380 would have been a perfect fit for older systems.

Maybe this is one of those "quick and dirty" port from the iGPU side.

 

[psolord]

Wtf I have a 8600k with z370 and I haven't seen that. I think I will go searching in the BIOS.

However the 8400+b360 we have at work, doesn't seem to have that option because I looked. But I will look again.

Guys, I found an option about "above 4G decoding" in the B360's bios. Does that have anything to do with rBar?

 

[moinmoin]

So it's a hardware design decision?

More like a hardware design indecision? iGPU is close to the CPU, and Rebar allows a dGPU to stay close to the CPU. I don't know what Intel did since the announcement of developing discrete GPUs nearly 5 years ago, but disaggregating the dGPU design from iGPU requirements didn't seem what they primarily worked on so far.

 

[DiogoDX]

Wtf I have a 8600k with z370 and I haven't seen that. I think I will go searching in the BIOS.

However the 8400+b360 we have at work, doesn't seem to have that option because I looked. But I will look again.

Here I have RBAR with my 8700K on a giga Z390 Aorus Elite using the bios F10h.

 

[Tup3x]

Guys, I found an option about "above 4G decoding" in the B360's bios. Does that have anything to do with rBar?

It is not the same thing but it needs to be on in order to get rebar to work.

 

[psolord]

It is not the same thing but it needs to be on in order to get rebar to work.

Ok then. The 360 does not have anything else. I will have a look on my z370, to see if it exists, but I have a 1070 there, so it's not important. I think.

 

[psolord]

On the other hand, I was thinking, if the A380 with OC gains so much performance, maybe it will not be too bad even in old systems. I mean it roughly seems like stock A380+rebar = A380 OC, right?