Intel promises "our drivers will get there" as Arc Alchemist A770 readies for launch

pcgamer.com:

Intel's Arc A770(opens in new tab) and Arc A750(opens in new tab) graphics cards go on sale on October 12th, although you'll get to see what we think of these cards later on today. In anticipation, Intel has posted what is probably the last of its chat videos(opens in new tab) with Ryan Shrout and Tom Petersen sitting down with Raja Koduri, the head of Intel's graphics division.

The 16-minute video is pretty relaxed and it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that there aren't any major reveals, although there are a couple of interesting explanations as to why Intel's re-entry into the discrete graphics market ran late and why optimising its drivers hasn't been easy.

Intel has been upfront about its driver performance in older DirectX games. In this video Koduri reiterates what Intel has been saying for months(opens in new tab): that «optimizing for an API is a non-trivial amount of work.» And that while there are games that are GPU bound, which run pretty fine without any optimisations, there are plenty of DX11 games that tend to be CPU bound. The solution here is to produce multithreaded drivers to make the most of the hardware available, and again that ain't easy. 

This is all complicated by the fact that Intel's drivers have traditionally focused on its integrated graphics. As Koduri explains, integrated graphics «don't have much die area and have limited memory bandwidth, so you become GPU limited very easily.» Leading to Intel's driver optimisations to focus on GPU-bound situations. Now that it's dealing with discrete graphics that isn't the case anymore though, and so a lot of work has had to be done to get older games running optimally and at the speeds we'd expect from a $330 graphics card.

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