News Intel GPUs - Falcon Shores cancelled

[maddie]

Sounds like you are suggesting a return to the days of contra revenue. Remember how that went?

Well, that ain't happening. Back then, Intel was the undisputed king. Now they're hemorrhaging in a rising interest rate environment.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Intel may offer slight bundle discounts if customers choose both Raptor Lake and an A770/A750. More revenue selling them together than separately.

 

[LightningZ71]

For those that might be interested, a post comment at Serve-The-home by Patrick Kennedy indicated that the Intel ARC desktop GPUs would retain the SR-IOV support present in the Data center GPUs with the caveat that there would be a "difference" that wasn't specified by Intel. Looking at the Flex brief, it shows that the Flex 140 supports 62 SR-IOV instances and the 170 supports 31. This leads me to believe that desktop cards may initially support a (my opinion) substantially reduced instance count of about 4-8, and that may be reduced in future products (as Intel gains market penetration and mindshare) to none. This one feature may make the 770 16GB card interesting as it could potentially support 4 instances at 1080p with modest settings for computer sharing (ala 2-gamers-1-gpu fame) without having to go through the Hyper-V multiple windows licenses approach...

 

[igor_kavinski]

This one feature may make the 770 16GB card interesting as it could potentially support 4 instances at 1080p with modest settings for computer sharing (ala 2-gamers-1-gpu fame) without having to go through the Hyper-V multiple windows licenses approach...

What's the use case? Internet gaming cafes using one PC for four players, saving on initial capital investment for the infrastructure as well as reduced operating expenses in terms of electric bills?

 

[LightningZ71]

I didn't say that it was a sound business model, just that the capability will likely be there. If you trawl the internet, you'll find a consistent flow of messages bemoaning SR-IOV support on modern consumer video cards. This would address that and help differentiate the product more against it's competition. As for internet cafe's, it's possible to build a system around a 7950X with two 770 cards and drive 8 separate seats of 1080p gaming at modest but usable performance. I wouldn't choose to do it myself, but, you could build a modest cafe around 4 computers and make a decent chunk of change in a reasonable market.

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

Intel needs to have a contest - $500,000 prize to whoever writes the most efficient driver for DirectX9, DirectX10, etc. for the cards. That should turbo charge development of better drivers. Could effectively improve performance by 20% to 25%.

 

[MrTeal]

Intel needs to have a contest - $500,000 prize to whoever writes the most efficient driver for DirectX9, DirectX10, etc. for the cards. That should turbo charge development of better drivers. Could effectively improve performance by 20% to 25%.

"Wow, look at all these entries from North Korea. They must really love gaming."
-Intel execs, 2023

 

[igor_kavinski]

If you trawl the internet, you'll find a consistent flow of messages bemoaning SR-IOV support on modern consumer video cards.

LibVF.IO: Commodity GPU Multiplexing Driven By VFIO & YAML.

Read this article's comment section on news.ycombinator.com 1 Abstract The following document describes the reasoning behind the creation of LibVF.IO, some basic definitions relating to GPU virtualization today, and a guide to using LibVF.IO for multiplexing vendor neutral commodity GPU devices...

arccompute.com

OK, I see that it would make running games in Windows VMs on Linux almost hassle-free. What about Windows VMs running on Windows? I think Microsoft removed that capability from Hyper-V due to some security issue?

 

[mikk]

Intel Arc Graphics Roundtable – Featuring Raja Koduri

GDDR6 memory controller is a problem beside the driver. Not unexpected because of the rBAR problematic.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

I don't get the hype about a $329 RTX 3060 competitor. Never liked the 3060 at the $320 fake msrp a year and a half ago much less now this late in the gen. If I thought 3060 performance was worth $330 I would have bought it 2.5 years ago with the 5700 XT.

 

[burninatortech4]

Intel Arc Graphics Roundtable – Featuring Raja Koduri

GDDR6 memory controller is a problem beside the driver. Not unexpected because of the rBAR problematic.

Interesting how forthright they are about the copy, binding vertex, and driver limitations they're seeing. Not used to corporations highlighting limitations of their own product.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Interesting how forthright they are about the copy and driver limitations they're seeing. Not used to corporations highlighting limitations of their own product.

They are like, "This was a way more monumental task than we had anticipated. Help us out! We are drowning! Have mercy on us!".

 

[Heartbreaker]

Steve and Steve review the new Intel A770:

Neither recommend it.

 

[NTMBK]

Intel A770, A750 review: We are this close to recommending these GPUs

New GPU series, ranging from $289 to $349, is less “amazing” and more “interesting.”…

arstechnica.com

Ars Technica are more positive than I anticipated. Some pretty great results, like RDR2 under Vulkan:

But then GTA V is a complete train wreck.

Edit: And some older games are just outright busted:

The original Portal (from 2007's Orange Box) suffers from multi-second hitches on any Arc card ranging from the A380 to the A770, typically when new portals are opened, along with occasional graphical corruption. We could not reproduce these kinds of stutters and glitches playing the game with the exact same settings on the nominally slower integrated Radeon GPU built into AMD's Ryzen 7 5700G, which suggests that this is a software problem and not a horsepower problem.

 

[Tup3x]

Well, it looks like their optimisations worked in Spider-Man, considering how things were with A380 + old drivers.


Basically the results are all over the place. It kinda makes sense though and just shows the driver situation. Games that are optimised can run really nicely while the rest are either less than optimal and some are horrible.

 

[Heartbreaker]

Intel A770, A750 review: We are this close to recommending these GPUs

New GPU series, ranging from $289 to $349, is less “amazing” and more “interesting.”…

arstechnica.com

Ars Technica are more positive than I anticipated. Some pretty great results, like RDR2 under Vulkan:

But then GTA V is a complete train wreck.

You can see the promise, if they can straighten out the drivers, but it's a hard sell currently.

Intel is going to need to really work on the drivers, and make a press release months later when things look better and try to get more reviews done then, to show progress.

 

[Tup3x]

It also look like they have memory management issues. In some cases the 8GB A750 tanks really hard while the 16GB A770 doesn't. Not surprising, considering the ReBAR stuff.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Ugh what a frustrating release with the A770. You can see the seeds of a good card being there, but I play too many old games and too many newer low budget Japanese games that aren't going to get the optimization that an RDR2 or a Spiderman will get for this card to be worthwhile for me. But I have to admit it is tempting at 25% faster than the 6600 XT at 4k in Techpowerup's testsuite. That cpu bottleneck though is also kind of concerning seeing it only leads the 6600 XT by 3% at 1440p and is 9% slower at 1080p in the same testsuite.

 

[Heartbreaker]

It also look like they have memory management issues. In some cases the 8GB A750 tanks really hard while the 16GB A770 doesn't. Not surprising, considering the ReBAR stuff.

It really seems if you did want to risk this, the 16GB model is the way to go, as it will hide some of the poor memory management in the early days and might turn into a boon if/when the driver issues get worked out.

 

[blckgrffn]

I, for one, am always surprised by how important GTA V is.

For the last three budget gaming PCs (the type I build...) the primary, if not only, game they were purchased for was GTA V. They were buying it to play online, obviously, and to free themselves from the shackles of the console versions. It feels a lot like the Minecraft crowd, once they see their favorite game in modded glory they can't go back. I've never played it, probably never will, so it always surprises me. Many Minecraft and GTA V PCs are built and purchased out there.

I hope that Intel dedicates themselves to fixing issues like that and like @guidryp says, let us know they are fixed. Otherwise this first round of reviews will be the touchstone for darn near the life of the cards.

Ars Technica did have a more positive tone than I expected as well, given how AMD parts there are usually dismissed because they are missing the necessary software support - DLSS.

@Tup3x

This is no joke, and Intel is quite clear about it.


As far as I can tell, that just checks for ReBar/SMA. If you don't have it, Intel tells you no, not compatible.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I will focus on the negatives from the reviews I have seen and read so far for those that are pressed for time and need the quick and dirty.

Quality of life issues are numerous. Audio cut out, audio device disappearing, reboots required for troubleshooting. VR rendering problems, GPU installation and detection problems. Some requiring experience and extra hardware or iGPU to troubleshoot. Among its biggest weaknesses are the most popular things i.e. 1080p gaming (which something like 65% of gamers still use.) Performance issues and bugginess in some of the most popular games like GTAV, CS:GO, and Apex Legends. No fan speed control for the end user yet. Though in all fairness, the cards don't run hot or loud. PITA to disassemble. Worthless for systems without rebar. This one everybody has known, and Intel practically screams it at you, but it is a very real drawback for those owners.

The biggest issue of all; price. It doesn't matter why Intel has to charge this much, the prices are bad. AMD wins there. Nvidia wins on quality of life and good ray tracing capability.

 

[coercitiv]

Turns out cheap GPU drivers are expensive. The hardware is sabotaged by the software package.

The asking price is a joke for gamers, but a serious issue for Intel. Their BOM was clearly meant for another performance segment.

 

[StinkyPinky]

Yeah I wouldn't touch these with all the widely inconsistent performance issues. I much prefer a slightly slower card where you know what you're getting game to game. Those GTA 5 numbers are grim as hell, they must have known this also. Yet the drivers they released for review didn't help at all. Which makes me think they really need to work on their drivers a lot or the hardware itself (or design) has limitations.

 

[Tup3x]

Quite impressive in Metro Exodus. It actually does look like Intel has more ray tracing oomph than NVIDIA and it can really shine in games lake these. Also the higher the resolution the better it does relative to competition.

Somewhat similar case in Control with RT enabled.

It probably should be trading blows with RTX 3070 class cards if the drivers didn't held it back.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Ars Technica did have a more positive tone than I expected as well, given how AMD parts there are usually dismissed because they are missing the necessary software support - DLSS.

Let me express it in meme -



I am exaggerating a bit, but just a bit. I get it though. We all want the extra competition, so they are looking for a silver lining.