[Hardware] Intel’s Latest Graphics Driver For Arc GPUs Improves Synthetic Benchmark Performance But Leaves Gaming Performance In The Dust

[ROVEN]

 

Intel has released a brand new graphics driver for its Arc GPUs which focuses purely on enhancing synthetic benchmarks performance and not games.

Intel Releases Brand New Arc GPU Drivers That Focus On Optimizing Synthetic Benchmarks & Not Gaming Performance

We have been told by Intel officially that Intel's Arc GPU drivers are the main cause of delay for the lineup. The poor software readiness means that although the hardware is already built and ready to ship to consumers, the blue team has to delay or launch the lineup in selective regions to avoid any major backlash from the poor performance and software ecosystem.

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With that said, Intel has released a brand new driver, the Graphics Beta Driver 30.0.101.1743, for its Arc GPU lineup, mainly the Alchemist high-end mobility GPUs which include the Arc A770M and the Arc A550M. Adding support for these GPUs means that selected regions, mainly China, are going to get laptops and solutions based on these GPUs in the coming days.

Besides adding support for the said chips, Intel also adds 'Game-On' driver support for a few titles such as Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak, F1 2022, and Arcadegeddon. There's also an interesting & new feature that's being included in the Arc graphics driver known as the 'Advanced Performance Optimizations' which can be enabled through the Arc Control panel. This feature is set to improve performance in synthetic benchmarks such as 3DMark Time Spy and 3DMark Port Royal. Following is the full description:

 

GAMING HIGHLIGHTS:

• Support for Intel Arc A770M and A550M Graphics (Codename Alchemist).
• Intel Game On Driver support for Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak*, F1 2022*, and Arcadegeddon* on Intel Arc A-Series Graphics.
• Advanced Performance Optimizations: A new feature now available within Arc Control that allows users to select and enable advanced application optimizations. The initial implementation of the feature only affects 3DMark Timespy and 3DMark Port Royale.  Integrated graphics performance, as well as discrete GPU game and content creation applications, will see no performance impact from the disabling of the optimizations

Since launch, Intel's Arc GPU drivers had this feature enabled by default which increased their overall performance in synthetic benchmarks. You might remember that Intel's Arc graphics initially showed very competitive numbers in synthetic benchmarks against the competition but failed to translate that into gaming performance. Well with the toggle, we can now see a more realistic performance demonstration. @0x22h provided his numbers which show that with the advanced performance optimization disabled, the Intel Arc A380 ends up 15% slower.

 

Intel's Arc GPU lineup has so far not showcased any competitive performance numbers. Although it does beat the recently released GTX 1630, it's not that impressive when we compare it to AMD's RX 6400 or NVIDIA's GTX 1650 graphics cards. Furthermore, Intel has mostly highlighted its GPU synthetic performance over real-world gaming performance and I think that should change & Intel should provide a more realistic picture of their Arc graphics cards with a proper release schedule & performance numbers that reflect that actual gaming numbers.