News Intel GPUs - Falcon Shores cancelled

[QueBert]

This popped into my head with the release of NV's next gen and the impending release of AMD's next gen:

View attachment 72382

I'm building a PC 'round the end of this month. I've been thinking RX 6800, but it's too much $$$ and I've been randomly finding some articles about how Intel's improved the ARC drivers a decent bit already. And the buyer reviews for the cards are pretty good. While I don't generally put much weight in customer reviews on Newegg, what I read was mostly good and even some of the bad reviews still made it sound not too bad. It's definitely not a super great choice over AMD. But compared to the original reviews which had me swearing off even thinking about getting one. I'm really considering an A770, paired with a 13600k on a Z790 MB (what I'm getting) I bet I'd be decently happy with the performance. The A770 has more potential over the 6600 I'm looking at, that's assuming Intel stays on top of improving the drivers. Which they seem to be doing a fairly decent job at over the past few months.

I'm waiting now to see if 7000 cards push the price of AMD's mid-level cards down some. I definitely won't be buying a $900+ 7800/7900 or a stupidly overpriced RTX. I actually might get an ARC 770 in a couple weeks, if I did it still wouldn't even break the 10 worst computer component choices I've made in my 35 years at this sh*t lol.

And while I haven't even read thru most of this thread, seeing this many pages is a good sign. If Intel can keep improving the drivers this will be the sleeper card of 2022.

 

[gdansk]

In my opinion, @QueBert we are better off ignoring potential. Vega 56 had a lot of potential. But it didn't really pan out. A770 has some potential. But it is a risky wager given the present economic conditions at Intel. If there is a division that can be cut to save costs without reducing revenue it's consumer GPUs and the driver team.

There are 6700XT-6750XT to consider too. Especially if you are at 1440p.

 

[QueBert]

In my opinion, @QueBert we are better off ignoring potential. Vega 56 had a lot of potential. But it didn't really pan out. A770 has some potential. But it is a risky wager given the present economic conditions at Intel. If there is a division that can be cut to save costs without reducing revenue it's consumer GPUs and the driver team.

There are 6700XT-6750XT to consider too. Especially if you are at 1440p.

You're right, but ARC's looks to be pretty usable at the moment with a decent number of people owning one. I know I said I'm really considering ARC, but I'm more just thinking it over, a Radeon card's still at the top of my list. What shocks me about even pondering ARC is 8 months ago there was 0% a 3rd card out there. If ARC existed I didn't even know about it. It was AMD or Nvidia. And until what I've read this week, I hadn't thought ARC from when I 1st heard about it until today. Intel's actually made it into the GPU market. When was the last time there was a 3rd player? Voodoo or NEC's Power VR2. Voodoo was really it though, was good I owned a few cards. While I did have a PVR2 card, I think I might have been one of maybe a dozen people who actually owned one. It was given to me, I didn't buy the s**t lol.

6700 XTs look really good and would definitely a safer card to get. Yet, here I am maybe deciding on an unproven 3rd card lol.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

You're right, but ARC's looks to be pretty usable at the moment with a decent number of people owning one. I know I said I'm really considering ARC, but I'm more just thinking it over, a Radeon card's still at the top of my list. What shocks me about even pondering ARC is 8 months ago there was 0% a 3rd card out there. If ARC existed I didn't even know about it. It was AMD or Nvidia. And until what I've read this week, I hadn't thought ARC from when I 1st heard about it until today. Intel's actually made it into the GPU market. When was the last time there was a 3rd player? Voodoo or NEC's Power VR2. Voodoo was really it though, was good I owned a few cards. While I did have a PVR2 card, I think I might have been one of maybe a dozen people who actually owned one. It was given to me, I didn't buy the s**t lol.

6700 XTs look really good and would definitely a safer card to get. Yet, here I am maybe deciding on an unproven 3rd card lol.

You should go ARC; do an all Intel build. If you don't like it, Newegg is doing returns until 1/31/23. The Acer card looks pretty slick and should be far easier to redo thermal compound and pads than the Intel card.

 

[mikk]

Raja Koduri told there is a DX11 update coming shortly after the DX9 update: https://www.gadgets360.com/laptops/...aming-in-india-meteor-lake-integrated-3585931

 

[Tup3x]

More DigitalFoundry testing (sponsored by Intel):

 

[QueBert]

You should go ARC; do an all Intel build. If you don't like it, Newegg is doing returns until 1/31/23. The Acer card looks pretty slick and should be far easier to redo thermal compound and pads than the Intel card.

Hummm, [company] builds are cool if you're a big techie YT reviewer and the company sponsors it. And after the s&&t with Steve from Gamers Nexus Newegg really seemed like a company nobody should support. But they are pretty much the only site I'm seeing ARC cards at retail price lol. And odd you mentioned the Acer Predator, I was going to bring it up in my other post. It looks... interesting. I've never seen a card with a regular fan and a blower. And it's just my old man bias and they're not the same company, but all I remember about Acer was cheap, really low end pre builts 20+ years ago. Their card has 8+8 and the normal a770's 8+6 for power, I should go find some reviews maybe it's an OC'ed card.

20 years ago if someone had told me I'd be considering an Acer component in my lifetime I would have laughed at them. Yet here I am about to go read up on their card.

*EDIT*
Googling it has OC in the name, but is running at reference speeds, there don't seem to be any reviews, and now I'm wondering what the hell the OC means if it's stock speed. You have me somewhat interested in this card I hope to find a couple in depth reviews of it by the time I'm ready to buy a card in 2'ish weeks.

 

[Panino Manino]

Raja Koduri told there is a DX11 update coming shortly after the DX9 update: https://www.gadgets360.com/laptops/...aming-in-india-meteor-lake-integrated-3585931

Talking about the devil, I was thinking about him.
Now that things are looking nicer and there are some things to praise no one remembers about him.

 

[lopri]

I am tempted to get an A770 just to see what it is. And to be rid NVIDIA of my system. XD. Reports around the web seem positive, especially after the latest driver update.

 

[maddie]

Well I'm pleasantly surprised. It's good that Intel appears to be improving quickly.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Raja Koduri told there is a DX11 update coming shortly after the DX9 update: https://www.gadgets360.com/laptops/...aming-in-india-meteor-lake-integrated-3585931

I liked this snippet from the interview:

So what are the major constraints that you face [in developing and popularising Arc]?

Raja Koduri: On the gaming side, the install base of old games is amazing. DirectX 9 is an API that launched in 2002. It's a 20-year-old API and there are games that haven't been touched for more than a decade but are very, very popular. Some of them actually have bugs. It isn't just our driver; there were wrong uses of the API but they were bug-compatible with older AMD or NVIDIA drivers. So we have to make them work. The user doesn't really care about what an API is, right? They just plug in an Arc card and run a game and say it doesn't work. So it's our responsibility to make it work, no matter where in the stack of properties [an incompatibilty lies]. That's the long tail that we had to check, but we pretty much went through 95–96 percent of all those issues on our path to launch. Now we're on the last 1–3 percent and we have managed to hammer through these releases.

As we get to 2023 I'm very optimistic that much of the compatibility challenges we had at Arc launch will be behind us and people can focus on all the incredible positives that it brings. Gaming: nice, smooth performance. Media: AV1 encode/ decode performance, even $1,000 – 1,900 GPUs don't come close to Arc's transcoding performance. Ray tracing and XeSS is far ahead.

Just price or performance-per-dollar competitiveness with AMD and Nvidia wasn't the goal. It was the baseline, but we wanted to do something beyond that. So that's the reason why we did what we did with AV1. Media plays a big role; more people are streaming their gameplay all the time. I don't want people to have to buy another expensive card [for encoding].

No, Raja dearie. Go get some sleep and look at the raytracing graphs in the morning after your morning coffee.

But hopefully, we will have at least an AMD killer in Battlemage, if not an Nvidia killer.

 

[scineram]

I am tempted to get an A770 just to see what it is. And to be rid NVIDIA of my system. XD. Reports around the web seem positive, especially after the latest driver update.

Just look at the brights side of it. Whatever you get to replace your Geforce at least it is not an AMD Radeon.

 

[QueBert]

Intel and these motherboard makers really should do a better job and update some of their damn info. I watched and few YT reviews and read a few on ARC cards. Every one mentioned how the cards really need a system with Rebar support to be usable. I've been out of the loop for newer technology so I decided to look it up and read up to see what it was exactly. The info I found from Intel, Nvidia, Asus & Gigabyte was old as hell and outdated. I've been around computers since the start, nbut less techie people might see Intel saying it only works with 10th, 11th, and 12th gen Intel CPU's (they put the info up before Raptor Lake was a thing) and Asus making no mention of MB's after X470 & b550 and be confused and think Raptor Lake/Ryzen 7000's on a Z690/790 or X690/X790 board doesn't have Rebar support. Hell, this is what I found on Gigabyte's webpage about Rebar

CPUs
The following CPUs support Resizable BAR.

Intel:
11th Gen S-Series – i9-11xxx, i7-11xxx, i5-11xxx
10th Gen – i9-10xxx, i7-10xxx, i5-10xxx, i3-10xxx

AMD:
Ryzen 5000 – Ryzen 9 59xx, Ryzen 7 58xx, Ryzen 5 56xx
Ryzen 3000 – Ryzen 9 39xx, Ryzen 7 38xx, Ryzen 7 37xx, Ryzen 5 36xx, Ryzen 5 35xx, Ryzen 3 33xx, Ryzen 3 31xx


It would literally take whoever does their website about a minute to update that to current info.


I Googled "Asus Motherboards that support Reasizeable BAR" and got a list that said "For those with Intel platforms, many of our B460, H410, H470, Z490, Z590, and X299 motherboards now support Resizable BAR" Uh Z690, Z790, hello? I'm building a PC later this month so just to see I looked at the product page and manual for both boards I'm looking at, no mention of Rebar at all on either. Common sense tells me if it worked with 12th gen CPU's and it's needed on a current GPU that 13th gen CPUs and newer MB chipsets will obviously work. But they can't expect everyone to understand this.

This is one of the 1st things that comes up when I Googled which Intel CPU's have Rebar support.

Intel Arc GPUs Support Resizable BAR with 10th, 11th, 12th Gen CPUs Only

Yes the article was written before 13th gen was out, but IMHO they should have worded it better. 10th gen CPU's or newer is much less confusing than saying 10th, 11th, 12th gen CPU's Only. While I can't find much info about the future of Rebar, I'm just assuming it's permanent and will be in all future CPU's and MB chipsets.

I know everyone on these forums is smart enough to figure all this out. But maybe some lower tech person's looking at ARC and wondering about this and will stumble on this thread and it'll help them.


Unless the Radeon 7000 launch pushes the 6800 xt price down a lot, which I'm doubtful. I'll be getting the Acer Predator card later this month, it's just weird when I think about building a new gaming pc around a graphics card from Acer of all companies ha.

 

[igor_kavinski]

While I can't find much info about the future of Rebar, I'm just assuming it's permanent in all future CPU's and MB chipsets.

You assume correct. Rebar helps to stream data to the ARC A770 in bigger chunks which improves performance.

Nvidia’s Resizable BAR explained: What is it and how can you get a gaming boost?

Nvidia debuted Resizable BAR on its RTX 3060, and its coming to other RTX 3000 cards in March, allowing gamers to get a boost in select titles.

www.digitaltrends.com

Prior to the rollout of Resizable BAR, a CPU could access only a small portion of the graphics memory, or VRAM. Traditionally, this is limited to about 256MB, or the maximum capacity that’s allowed with a 32-bit operating system. Each time a CPU needs to communicate with the GPU, the commands are stored on this 256MB portion of the VRAM.

This implementation leads to a bottleneck, as commands must be sequentially queued. Instructions cannot be sent in parallel.

The Resizable BAR addresses this bottleneck in CPU-GPU communication by allowing the processor to negotiate the size of the BAR on the GPU. Essentially, this gives the CPU full access to the VRAM on a processor. By opening up access to the GPU’s memory, the processor can send multiple instructions to the GPU in parallel, which will speed things up.

“As you move through a world in a game, GPU memory (VRAM) constantly transfers textures, shaders, and geometry via many small CPU-to-GPU transfers,” Nvidia explained. “With the ever-growing size of modern game assets, this results in a lot of transfers. Using Resizable BAR, assets can instead be requested as needed and sent in full, so the CPU can efficiently access the entire frame buffer. And if multiple requests are made, transfers can occur concurrently, rather than queuing.”

 

[igor_kavinski]

Unless the Radeon 7000 launch pushes the 6800 xt price down a lot, which I'm doubtful. I'll be getting the Acer Predator card later this month, it's just weird when I think about building a new gaming pc around a graphics card from Acer of all companies ha.

Acer Predator and Swift laptops are fairly successful.

 

[QueBert]

Acer Predator and Swift laptops are fairly successful.

Googling Acer I see the Predator line looks fairly nice. high speed gen 4 m.2? RGB ram? The fact I could do an Acer Predator themed gaming pc build and it would be pretty decent's really messing with my head lol. I remember when Acer was basically just a step up from Packard Bell.

The more I'm finding on their ARC card the more I'm liking it.

 

[KompuKare]

Talking about the devil, I was thinking about him.
Now that things are looking nicer and there are some things to praise no one remembers about him.

Well, I guess there is a possibility we might have been a bit hard on him, but he came out so often blowing his own trumpet that he was an obvious target!

 

[QueBert]

So on Google I'm not seeing any benchmarks with the 8gb model or any sites comparing it against the 16gb. Newegg has the Asrock Phantom 8gb A770 for $329. I'm wondering what difference if any the extra memory will make. The a770 isn't a powerhouse and the cards it's directly competing with are almost all 8gb accept a few oddball ones that have 12.

One site says

As you can see, the two Arc A770s are virtually the same, apart from the large disparity in memory size: 16GB and 8GB.

And goes into absolutely zero detail about performance. Unless the memory doesn't matter, I'd say double the ram makes them pretty damn different. $329 for the ASRock's a hellova deal if the performance will be close to the 16gb model.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

As you can see, the two Arc A770s are virtually the same, apart from the large disparity in memory size: 16GB and 8GB.

And goes into absolutely zero detail about performance. Unless the memory doesn't matter, I'd say double the ram makes them pretty damn different. $329 for the ASRock's a hellova deal if the performance will be close to the 16gb model.

The A770 16GB is a 1440p capable GPU in new games. At that resolution, the 8GB model isn't enough. Once the frame buffer is full, frame pacing goes in the toilet. That makes the 16GB model well worth the extra $70.

The reason I recommended the Acer, is the Intel card is going to be inordinately difficult to maintain when it needs new thermal compound and/or pads.

 

[QueBert]

The A770 16GB is a 1440p capable GPU in new games. At that resolution, the 8GB model isn't enough. Once the frame buffer is full, frame pacing goes in the toilet. That makes the 16GB model well worth the extra $70.

The reason I recommended the Acer, is the Intel card is going to be inordinately difficult to maintain when it needs new thermal compound and/or pads.

I've owned a bunch of video cards and never had to take one apart to mess with pads or the compound. But none were even close to newer gen cards. Steve was highly displeased with opening up that card, and I don't blame him. The heads up about the 1440p gaming makes sense, I'll be getting a 13600k so 1440p would be good. It's ironic how the A770's pretty good in a lot of newer games but I play mostly older games where it lags lol. But it only getting 150 FPS on an older title where an RTX will get 250 is meaningless to me.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

The latest drivers address poor performance in some popular older titles. That will keep getting better. And I agree anything over the monitor refresh rate is unnecessary for those of us that are not the highly competitive online type.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

If anyone is wanting to sit around on a cold day and binge watch some ARC content I got you homie.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Here is another

 

[igor_kavinski]

Amazingly, 3060 is in the rear view mirror in a lot of the tested games.

 

[Hitman928]

Amazingly, 3060 is in the rear view mirror in a lot of the tested games.

The A770 die is 47% larger than a 3060 die and it's on a much better process. It shouldn't be surprising that it can beat a 3060 when the drivers aren't in the way.