Intel’s first discrete GPUs won't be a home run
- Reference: 1658165408
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/07/18/intel_arc_gpu_comparison/
- Source link:
The semiconductor giant signaled this on Friday when it said one of its upcoming flagship graphics cards for desktops, the A750, will provide slightly better performance than one of Nvidia's low-end cards with hardware-based real-time ray tracing, the GeForce RTX 3060, across select games.
What's important to note is that the A750 is part of the high-end Intel Arc 7 graphics lineup, which is complemented by Intel Arc 5 in the mid-range and Intel Arc 3 at the lowest performance tier. The GeForce RTX 3060, on the other hand, is one of Nvidia's lower-end RTX 30 cards, below [1]seven more powerful options , including top-tier GeForce RTX 3090 Ti.
[2]
While Intel has not revealed its full range of desktop graphics cards yet, the fact that it's putting one of its flagship cards head-to-head with a budget option from a competitor means we likely won't see Intel competing with Nvidia's cream-of-the-crop GPUs like the GeForce RTX 3080 this year.
[3]
[4]
Instead, we can expect this year's batch of Intel Arc graphics cards to compete with products roughly in the realm of the GeForce RTX 3060 and AMD's Radeon RX 6600 or lower. For Nvidia, there is only one other RTX 30 series card with ray tracing capabilities: the GeForce RTX 3050.
Intel abandons discrete graphics [5]2010 ARCHIVE
Was it fair to expect Intel to knock it out of the park with its first line of Arc GPUs? On one hand, this is Intel's first attempt at making discrete GPUs in many, many years and building leadership can take time. On the other, Intel is also in the process of developing [6]Ponte Vecchio , a datacenter GPU for high-performance computing and AI workloads that is set to go into one of the world's faster supercomputers this year.
Regardless of expectations, there is a potential silver lining: Intel is at least creating some competition for Nvidia and AMD in the lower performance range.
As one reader [7]pointed out , the 3060 is the most-used GPU in Nvidia’s RTX 30 series, according to Steam’s monthly hardware survey, and one of the cheapest, which means the A750 could end up selling well enough if its price is right and performance holds up across multiple games. Not everyone needs the highest-end silicon for entertainment.
[8]
The addition of a third GPU vendor will also be a welcome sight after the semiconductor industry experienced more than two years of shortages. Though there is the question of whether Intel Arc GPUs are arriving at the wrong part of the cycle, given that there is now a [9]glut of graphics chips in the market.
In Intel's Friday [10]video update , marketer Ryan Shrout showed that the A750 can provide an average of 60 frames per second in Cyberpunk 2077 on high settings at a 1440p resolution. He said this is 15 percent higher than what Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060 is capable of.
Shrout gave a few other examples where the A750 can run games faster than the GeForce RTX 3060 at high settings at a 1440p resolution: 17 percent faster for F1 2021, 14 percent faster for Control, 13 percent faster for Borderlands 3, and 6 percent faster for Fortnite
[11]
The Intel marketer noted, however, that these games have benefited from Intel's software engineering efforts, which means that other games may not show the same results.
This first generation of Intel Arc graphics, collectively known as the A-Series, comes with several features, such as hardware-based ray tracing, hardware-based AV1 encoding and decoding, and an AI-powered image upscaling technology called XeSS.
[12]Intel axes Nvidia-powered NUC X15 laptops for Arc GPU reseller push
[13]Arm says its Cortex-X3 CPU smokes this Intel laptop silicon
[14]Arm jumps on ray tracing bandwagon with beefy GPU design
[15]Nvidia promises annual updates across CPU, GPU, DPU lines
If Intel can enable a larger set of games to take advantage of its graphics architecture, the company's latest discrete GPUs may be worthwhile for those who aren't looking to spend a lot of money on a PC — as long as they are competitively priced. But those decisions shouldn't be made until independent reviews and benchmarks can provide a better picture of overall performance and reliability.
It may take a little while longer to get your hands on a graphics card from Intel or one of its board partners. After all, the company has experienced delays in rolling out its laptop and desktop GPUs due to [16]software issues and COVID lockdowns in China.
Some [17]laptops with low-end Intel Arc GPUs are now available in the West, and Intel's first Arc graphics card for desktops, the low-end A380, [18]arrived in China last month. As for the rest of the world, the company said in May that Intel Arc 5 and Intel 7 graphics cards will start to arrive later this summer while laptops with those GPUs were expected to hit earlier in the season.
If you're hoping to see faster GPUs from Intel, we suggest waiting for the x86 giant's [19]next two generations of Arc GPUs to see what progress the company can make. The second generation of Arc GPUs, code-named Battlemage, is expected to arrive in 2023 and 2024 while the third generation of graphics chips, known under the Celestial code name, will hit the market in 2024 and beyond. ®
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[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/30-series/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YtXYAo@zXf3LJALcGpC0FAAAAJg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YtXYAo@zXf3LJALcGpC0FAAAAJg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YtXYAo@zXf3LJALcGpC0FAAAAJg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/25/intel_isc_announcements/
[6] https://www.nextplatform.com/2021/08/24/intels-ponte-vecchio-gpu-better-not-be-a-bridge-too-far/
[7] https://twitter.com/herrmansen/status/1549084728074043392
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YtXYAo@zXf3LJALcGpC0FAAAAJg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/07/global_gpu_shortage/
[10] https://game.intel.com/story/intel-arc-a750-graphics-performance-preview/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YtXYAo@zXf3LJALcGpC0FAAAAJg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/13/intel_axes_nvidiapowered_nuc_x15/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/28/arm_says_new_x3_cpu/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/28/arm_jumps_on_ray_tracing/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/24/nvidia_enterprise_product_release_cadence/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/11/intel_arc_delays/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/30/intel_arc_gpu/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/15/intel_arc_gpu_china_debut/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/intel_gpu_plans/
[20] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
3060
Low end?
Not quite sure I'd call a £350-450 card low end, though I'll admit it's a while since I've cared about GPU performance.
Re: 3060
It's like a €400 / $400 smartphone being "entry level"...
I'd rather buy a couple of those --->
(and @John Robson can have one too)
Re: 3060
Fairly, I'd call it mid-range, but a generation behind. So that makes the Intel part "mostly adequate" at it's best. Plus expect a ton of compatibility/driver issues.
But it will squeeze AMD on the "we need something better than IRIS graphics" for all the biz machines out there. So it's probably playing it's part keeping the status quo of the duopoly intact. Also, it will probably run windows 11, if for some reason you want to. So there's that at least.
Those that strive for mediocrity often find it.
Intel's problems with GPUs run deep and appear to be as much about culture as technology. Unlike the skull trail team, which gets it, the graphics team is culturally stuck in "middle of the roadism". Some of the skull trail stuff is overhyped trash, but it is internally aspirational to kick ass. Sometimes it get there, sometimes it's a miss. But what to they say about the swings you don't take right?
For years Intel has been the main pusher of defective shared memory graphics chipsets. A tragic crapfest that has crippled many a value conscious laptop or SFF PC. Worse, tons of parts for desktop PC's had the same class of graphics as an obligatory pack in, leading to years of systems that shipped with a missconfigured BIOS and had dedicated graphics hardware that weren't actually used because the on-die GPU was set to the default.
While it may take a while for a new entrant to get in the game, I'd feel less like this is just history repeating if they at least showed they were trying to swing for the fences, not aspire to bunt at every pitch. This feels like little league ambition driving t-ball engineering. Even if it's a few years out, I want to see them shooting for where AMD or NVIDIA will be a year from now, not where they were 5 years ago.
I suspect these will be a little hard to find: Intel have declined to deliberately hobble their mining performance.
These probably won't make a change to the chip shortage or surplus, since all GPU chips are made in the same factory regardless.
Why does Intel use 3,5,7 for processors and now graphics cards? Does anyone else find it odd?
To be fair...
...being comparable to a GeForce RTX 3060 is better than their current range of integrated GPUs which are slightly less powerful than my toaster. And a bazillion times better than the Intel GPU in my Zenbook which has the same fill rate as a Bic biro.