News Intel GPUs - Battlemage officially announced, evidently not cancelled

[mikk]

Three more A380 reviews:

Intel Arc A380 (Xe HPG) im Test

Wie gut ist Intel Arc? Der Test einer importierten Arc A380 aus China liefert auch ohne Muster von Intel Antworten auf diese Frage.

www.computerbase.de

Golem.de: IT-News für Profis

www.golem.de

Intel Arc A380 6GB Review: Gunnir Photon including benchmarks, detailed analysis and extensive teardown | igor´sLAB

Finally, the time has come and I can finally offer you the detailed review of the Gunnir Arc A380 6GB Photon, which should provide interesting conclusions and also prospects for the larger models.

www.igorslab.de

 

[Karnak]

Just when I thought things couldn't get any worse. Damn, these reviews are horrible for Arc and Intel, especially on the driver side.

 

[KompuKare]

Well at least CB experienced a memorable review:
Intel Arc A380 im Test: Eine Woche zwischen Lachen und Weinen
(Intel Arc A380 in test: one week between laughing and crying).

 

[uzzi38]

Three more A380 reviews:

Intel Arc A380 (Xe HPG) im Test

Wie gut ist Intel Arc? Der Test einer importierten Arc A380 aus China liefert auch ohne Muster von Intel Antworten auf diese Frage.

www.computerbase.de

Golem.de: IT-News für Profis

www.golem.de

Intel Arc A380 6GB Review: Gunnir Photon including benchmarks, detailed analysis and extensive teardown | igor´sLAB

Finally, the time has come and I can finally offer you the detailed review of the Gunnir Arc A380 6GB Photon, which should provide interesting conclusions and also prospects for the larger models.

www.igorslab.de

Hold up a second. How come the perf hit from RT is essentially the same as the 6400? I thought Arc was supposed to have more competent RT hardware?

Referencing:

 

[igor_kavinski]

I thought Arc was supposed to have more competent RT hardware?

Maybe XeSS can ameliorate some of that RT performance hit, somewhere down the line.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

How dare it break the rules!

It's not the only one breaking the rules. After the AGESA 1.2.0.7 update, my 1700 + AB350M Pro4 works with SAM too.

Leading me to believe it's a question of which AGESA you're running, rather then CPU generation.

 

[mikk]

Hold up a second. How come the perf hit from RT is essentially the same as the 6400? I thought Arc was supposed to have more competent RT hardware?

RX6400 is losing 11-13% more with RT on relative to A380.

 

[João Bortolace]

Hold up a second. How come the perf hit from RT is essentially the same as the 6400? I thought Arc was supposed to have more competent RT hardware?

Referencing:

Hold up a second. How come the perf hit from RT is essentially the same as the 6400? I thought Arc was supposed to have more competent RT hardware?

Referencing:

View attachment 64800



View attachment 64801

Are these games dxr 1.0 or 1.1? Arc doesn't like 1.1

Hold up a second. How come the perf hit from RT is essentially the same as the 6400? I thought Arc was supposed to have more competent RT hardware?

Referencing:

View attachment 64800



View attachment 64801

Are these games dxr 1.0 or 1.1? Arc doesn't like 1.1

 

[KompuKare]

RX6400 is losing 11-13% more with RT on relative to A380.

Only for the F1 22 mins though, Lego is much closer.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Three more A380 reviews:

Intel Arc A380 (Xe HPG) im Test

Wie gut ist Intel Arc? Der Test einer importierten Arc A380 aus China liefert auch ohne Muster von Intel Antworten auf diese Frage.

www.computerbase.de

Refreshing to see a reviewer that is willing to put the work in. He not only used a realistic test bed reflecting the type of hardware more likely to be paired with the card. He eschewed the bot script level "Must test everything at max settings" nonsense. And instead, like an actual budget gamer, used varying settings depending on the game. Settings that you would expect a modern budget card to be able to handle.

I usually only go there when someone links them, but they are bookmarked now. So impressed by his wok ethic, that I turned off adblocking for them.

 

[uzzi38]

Refreshing to see a reviewer that is willing to put the work in. He not only used a realistic test bed reflecting the type of hardware more likely to be paired with the card. He eschewed the bot script level "Must test everything at max settings" nonsense. And instead, like an actual budget gamer, used varying settings depending on the game. Settings that you would expect a modern budget card to be able to handle.

I usually only go there when someone links them, but they are bookmarked now. So impressed by his wok ethic, that I turned off adblocking for them.

ComputerBased is indeed based.

Actually genuinely probably the best review outlet currently, they're always the most in depth by far.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

ComputerBased is indeed based.

Actually genuinely probably the best review outlet currently, they're always the most in depth by far.

I have been on the war path with big reviewers the last couple of years because of how badly they phone it in. Even if they test 50 GPUs in 50 games, the info is at best of limited utility, at worst, downright gaslighting.

As I go through his review, he keeps pointing out all the important parts others either gloss over, or omit in their conclusions. This line jumped out at me - "In some games, the FPS on the Arc A380 is decent, but the game still gets annoying." The very reason I dislike average FPS chart analysis at the end of tech tube vids. It is one of the worst used car salesperson tactics in the industry.

Intel better fix the lack of support for AMD pronto. That is a deal killer; one far worse than PCIE 3.0 performance with the Radeons. Which when you see all of them tested at reasonable settings for budget cards, on a realistic test bed, really drives home how good the Radeons are compared to the other sub $200 offerings. AMD made the mistake of trying to offer a card gamers could afford, without the miners and scalpers ruining the party, and got destroyed for it. Then the plot twist: Nvidia and Intel put out AMD's trash fire, in the most unexpected way possible. By stealing all the oxygen with their much larger trash fires.

 

[psolord]

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

Well the reason my z370 showed no rebar support, is because it was not there indeed. However your mention of a bios version made me look at the available bioses in Asrock's website.

Turns out there is a 2021 bios ver 4.21b that actually enables rebar for the poor old coffelake indeed.

before


after


Funny thing Asrock calling it C.A.M. Fitting too, cause when I saw rebar support for my coffeelake I actually came! xD

There is a shortcoming though. In my mobo I have to disable csm for the rebar option to appear, which in turn disables some stuff, which in my case includes the ability to boot from a pcie to nvme card, where my OS resides. And I spent like 5 minutes to figure out why the system was booting back into the uefi, lol.

Anyhoo, I did not need rebar for this system. The 1070 does not need it and now I am not going to use it even harder! xD Still it's good to know that rebar support goes five years back. It's not too bad for Arc after all.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

There is a shortcoming though. In my mobo I have to disable csm for the rebar option to appear, which in turn disables some stuff, which in my case includes the ability to boot from a pcie to nvme card, where my OS resides. And I spent like 5 minutes to figure out why the system was booting back into the uefi, lol.

Turning off CSM is a general requirement for rebar on any platform. So that is just the way it is.

Why you can't boot from an adaptor with it on is a bit strange though. Maybe just an oversight from Asrock?

 

[Stuka87]

Turning off CSM is a general requirement for rebar on any platform. So that is just the way it is.

Why you can't boot from an adaptor with it on is a bit strange though. Maybe just an oversight from Asrock?

I would have to dig up some articles to refresh my memory, but as I recall, if you have windows installed on a PCIe drive before reBAR is on, and then enable reBAR, you have to reinstall windows.

 

[Tup3x]

So apparently they are going to price it how it performs in the worst case situation (tier 3 games, i.e. <=DX11). Also in tier 1 games (optimised) the performance should be really good. Trier 2 games (general DX12 and Vulkan performance) is quite good mostly.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider run 2x faster in DX11...

 

[igor_kavinski]

Good that Intel explained the driver rollback issue. So if you have a laptop or a pre-built PC, Windows will select the driver based on the OEM device ID to prevent compatibility issues but OEM drivers are usually much older and rarely updated.

 

[Leeea]

I would have to dig up some articles to refresh my memory, but as I recall, if you have windows installed on a PCIe drive before reBAR is on, and then enable reBAR, you have to reinstall windows.

This has not been the case in my personnel experience:

Started as Win 7 on Intel system with HDD.
Upgraded to MBT SATA SSD.
Upgraded to Windows 10.
Upgraded from Intel to AMD
Upgraded from MBT SATA to GPT SATA
Secure boot enabled
rebar enabled
AMD smart access memory enabled
Upgraded to NVMe SSD**

At no point was I required to reinstalled. Its been over 10 years now I think?

Spoiler: *

Despite my best efforts, I have not been able to get rid of the Intel RST application. It is like a cockroach, and I have given up on squashing it.

Spoiler: **

I was forced to manually setup the boot sectors and edit the uefi boot records via command line. Seemed unreasonably difficult.

 

[coercitiv]

So apparently they are going to price it how it performs in the worst case situation

Oh well, at least we're getting contra-revenue 2.0. Let there be chaos!

 

[NTMBK]

This has not been the case in my personnel experience:

Started as Win 7 on Intel system with HDD.
Upgraded to MBT SATA SSD.
Upgraded to Windows 10.
Upgraded from Intel to AMD
Upgraded from MBT SATA to GPT SATA
Secure boot enabled
rebar enabled
AMD smart access memory enabled
Upgraded to NVMe SSD**

At no point was I required to reinstalled. Its been over 10 years now I think?

Spoiler: *

Despite my best efforts, I have not been able to get rid of the Intel RST application. It is like a cockroach, and I have given up on squashing it.

Spoiler: **

I was forced to manually setup the boot sectors and edit the uefi boot records via command line. Seemed unreasonably difficult.

Have you considered maybe reinstalling Windows

 

[mikk]

So apparently they are going to price it how it performs in the worst case situation (tier 3 games, i.e. <=DX11). Also in tier 1 games (optimised) the performance should be really good. Trier 2 games (general DX12 and Vulkan performance) is quite good mostly.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider run 2x faster in DX11...

Seems like the high idle power will be fixed in August. G8 power state is not yet supported in current drivers.

Also they have fixed almost every issue they raised in a short time.

 

[Stuka87]

This has not been the case in my personnel experience:

Started as Win 7 on Intel system with HDD.
Upgraded to MBT SATA SSD.
Upgraded to Windows 10.
Upgraded from Intel to AMD
Upgraded from MBT SATA to GPT SATA
Secure boot enabled
rebar enabled
AMD smart access memory enabled
Upgraded to NVMe SSD**

At no point was I required to reinstalled. Its been over 10 years now I think?

Spoiler: *

Despite my best efforts, I have not been able to get rid of the Intel RST application. It is like a cockroach, and I have given up on squashing it.

Spoiler: **

I was forced to manually setup the boot sectors and edit the uefi boot records via command line. Seemed unreasonably difficult.

None of that covers the scenario that I mentioned. Which is having windows 10 installed on a PCIe NVMe drive. NOT an M.2 NVMe. Talking an SSD that plugs into a PCIe slot.

 

[Thunder 57]

Have you considered maybe reinstalling Windows

Yea, I can only imagine the amount of "Windows rot" going on there.

 

[Leeea]

Have you considered maybe reinstalling Windows

Its a pain.

A real pain.

Reinstalling windows is easy.

Reconfiguring storage spaces? annoying. Requires command line to.
Reconfiguring SMB to work with win xp VMs? annoying, they dropped support 2 sub releases back? rather not dig through the archives.
Re-setting up scheduled tasks? annoying.
Installing 5 differant versions of Visual Studio of which 2 are out of support? a pain.
Reinstalling ms sql server management tools and then all the licenses, keys, and certificates? a pain
Getting thunderbird to work just so again? annoying
amazon drive? annoying
google drive? annoying
one drive? annoying

it is just on and on, little things here and there and they all add up.

It is easier to just buy a bigger cpu, solves everything. If something bad happens, restore from backup is unpleasant, but still better then reinstall.

 

[psolord]

Turning off CSM is a general requirement for rebar on any platform. So that is just the way it is.

Why you can't boot from an adaptor with it on is a bit strange though. Maybe just an oversight from Asrock?

Maybe it's an oversight indeed. The actual problem on my system is that the nvme does not even appear with CSM disabled. So if the uefi does not see it, I don't think there's anything a user can do. Other than install the nvme, on the proper nvme slot of the mobo that is. Which right now for me is not an option, because I need these two satas that would be disabled.

If that system gets equipped with a rebar enhanced gpu, I will do a reconfiguration. Normally my 3060ti will end up on that system, so I will cross that bridge when the time comes.

For now I am happy the option is there, for a 5yo system and that Arc would work properly on those.