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Comment by dathinab | Hacker News Reader

Isn't a lot of the "arc is so bad judgement" quite per-mature.

I mean it's all based on the state of the driver used with pre-release GPUs and often the worst GPU of the lineup.

You could say this are beta drivers, but that is somehow not something people mention.

I mean sure there was a lunch of arc mobile GPUs but only in some specific region which was neither the US nor EU, it's as far as I can tell bit like a closed beta release from the dynamics involved.

So shouldn't we wait until the "proper" market launch of the dedicated gpus in the US before taking it apart as a catastrophe?

And sure older Games might not run as well, may some will never (which doesn't mean they don't run good enough to be played nicleye). Maybe except on steam because of the emulation of older direct X versions being base on Vulcan, that will be interesting.

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Intel has literally sent out engineers to LTT and Gamers Nexus to make this exact point. That being said, the cards are already out on the market and people can still buy them, so it's not like tech reviewers can hold off based on promised future performance.

FWIW I've heard DXVK actually can run on Windows, but you can't use it in AppX containers. Perhaps Intel bundling it with Ark's drivers would be a better option moving forward?

A few from a low-end SKU available only in China isn't exactly a launch. I've seen paper launches with more chips than that.

Btw, the second Gamers Nexus Arc video about tear reduction and frame graphs was awesome - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ENCV4xUjj0.

It's okay that those cards are reviewed according to their current state. They are pretty bad. But that doesn't mean the second or third generation of those cards has to be bad, when they remove the resizable bar requirement (so they can be used in older systems) and improve the drivers. DXVK would be a great route, but I doubt Intel can push this on a driver level - it would be more of a Steam or Windows thing.

I assume those cards will be a great option for Linux systems soon, where DXVK is the default anyway. It's good to have an alternative to AMD.

> remove the resizable bar requirement

They'd have to add support for changing the base address register. The easy default is just mapping all the memory directly. It's a lot more programming work to transfer data when you only have a 256MB window to work with. No use sticking with a limit that PCIe hasn't had since 32-bit.

There are still a ton of systems which have firmware that does not support large or resizable BAR. Support only became common in the last year or two (after AMD marketed as SAM and pushed to get it supported).

So requiring the “easy default” to be available means prohibiting any one with a system from ~2020 or earlier from upgrading to these GPUs.

Well, they just added small BAR support to the Linux driver, so Intel certainly agrees.

Yeah it seems pretty unrealistic to expect Intel to catch up to the NVIDIA and AMD duopoly on their first generation of (modern) cards.

Intel seems to have rightly recognized that the driver advantage is a huge moat for those guys - they have to instead compete on price and focus on having good support for titles that will get them the the biggest chunk of the market.

That said, man, if they could have released these a year ago the wind would have been at their back way more than it is now with GPU prices trending back towards MSRP.

idk man, Intel is one of the biggest richest tech (chip) companies in the world, I don't feel like I have to give them chances. This is pretty unprofessional.

In a similar vein I find reviews in general from most outlets are written only for the release day and are often either not revised if in written form, or not addressed in later videos.

Case in point Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 2 just saw a re-release where the devs didn't do much but port it to other systems and render the game at a higher resolution. It had a release day bug that caused the game to crash so [some review sites pan the game](https://xboxera.com/2022/07/21/review-baldurs-gate-dark-alli...) giving it low scores of sub-5-out-of-10. The devs fixed it the next day. Now is that particular site going to revise their review? No. It sits at a 4/10 with a small note at the top saying the glitch has been fixed.

Court of public opinion is obviously a thing with Intel, and there's a lot of long-established fanboyism with "team green" and "team red", so there's a lot of people looking to Intel to fail.

Also I hope it's only a matter of time until companies embrace abstraction layers like dxvk.

It's better then them assuming issues will be fixed by launch day. I'm still pissed at PC Gamer for giving Hellgate London a glowing review despite it being a buggy mess and making zero mention of it. That said should a barebones $30 port of a mediocre even at time 20 year old game get that high a score to begin with?

I agree that we should wait for the final release to make any judgements but these drivers have been in development for three years or so. They're not going to magically improve in the next few months.

It was announced that the pricing would be based on the performance of tier-3 titles (the ones not receiving special attention), so it could be a good deal before the drivers improve.

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