Recap: Intel launched the Arc 3 A380 in China earlier this yr and it lastly discovered its means into the fingers of reviewers final month. The consensus was that it carried out okay for an entry-level card however was too hindered by buggy drivers to be a product value shopping for.
Avid gamers Nexus took the time to make a video about simply the motive force issues (see above). In abstract, the sport drivers are sort-of alright: most newish video games load and play high-quality. However the driver installer is so problematic that it borders on being malware, and when the Arc Command app decides to not crash, its settings toggles and overclocking utilities barely work in any respect.
Partly in response, the VP and basic supervisor of the Visible Computing Group at Intel, Lisa Pearce, penned a weblog submit discussing some frequent issues in regards to the Arc sequence final week. She talks first in regards to the minor issues with DX11 and DX9 after which reiterates the significance of enabling Resizable Bar on Arc GPUs earlier than addressing the elephant within the room.
Intel’s query: I’ve learn critiques that say Intel’s driver just isn’t prepared but. What is the standing?
“We admire the suggestions we’re getting in early critiques of our Arc software program stack. And it has been bumpy. We now have obtained frank suggestions from press throughout current critiques, and we’ve got taken it to coronary heart.”
Pearce continues, however I would wish to pause right here to reiterate that the A380 hasn’t launched outdoors of China but.
Not one of the critiques, together with our personal, had been carried out via any type of evaluation program. As an alternative, reviewers have needed to buy their A380 samples from China and have them shipped.
“For instance, we filed 43 points with our engineering crew from a evaluation of the A380 by Avid gamers Nexus. We had corrected 4 of these points by the top of July. Since then, we corrected 21 UI points in our driver launch on August 19, and it additionally consists of Day 0 assist for Saints Row, Madden NFL 23, fixes for Stray and Horizon Zero Daybreak crashes, Marvel’s Spider-Man efficiency repair, and fixes on SmoothSync corruptions. We’re taking comparable approaches with reviews from different press critiques.
We’re persevering with to be taught what it’ll take for us to achieve success. A number of the points had been associated to our installer and the way it downloaded distinctive elements after preliminary set up. This permits us to have a smaller preliminary obtain to get customers began faster. However surprising failures are inflicting that course of to be unreliable, and later this yr we might be shifting to a mixed bundle that’s downloaded and put in abruptly. No extra installer points.”
It feels like Intel is listening to reviewers and reflecting on their suggestions, which is a nice change. Nevertheless, I discover it exhausting to consider that Intel wasn’t already conscious of many of the points identified by Avid gamers Nexus. They had been just too obvious and in the event that they had been as trivial to repair as Pearce claims, then they need to have been fastened earlier than the software program left beta. No less than a few of them are fastened now…
