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Comment by mise_en_place | Hacker News Reader

Intel pivoting to GPUs was a smart move but they just lacked the tribal knowledge needed to successfully ship a competitive GPU offering. We got Arc instead.

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Isn't Arc actually pretty okay?

It's getting better and drivers are improving all the time. I personally liked the Arc for the hardware AV1 encoding. Quicksync (I use qsvencc) is actually pretty decent for a hardware encoder. It won't ever beat software encoding, but the speed is hard to ignore. I don't have any experience using it for streaming, but it seems pretty popular there too. Nvidia has nvenc, and reviews say it's good as well but I've never used it.

This. If you follow GamersNexus, there are stories every month about just how much the Arc drivers have improved. If this rate continues and the next-gen hardware (Battlemage) actually ships, then Intel might be a serious contender for the midrange. I really hope Intel sticks with it this time as we all know it takes monumental effort to enter the discrete GPU market.

When it works, perhaps

They mostly work now and they are decent options at the low-end (what used to be the mid-range: $200) where there is shockingly little competition nowadays.

However, they underperform greatly compared to competitors' cards with similar die areas and memory bus widths. For example the Arc A770 is 406mm^2 on TSMC N6 and a 256-bit bus and performs similarly to the RX 6650XT which is 237mm^2 on TSMC N7 with a 128-bit bus. They're probably losing a lot of money on these cards.

Arc seems more like, where the GPU will 'be' in another 2-6 years. Where Arc's second or third iteration might be more competitive. Vulkan / future focused, fast enough that some translation layers for old <= DX11 / OpenGL are worth it.

If you're hoping for an nVidia competitor, the units in that market may be more per unit, but there's already an 1-ton gorilla there and AMD can't seem to compete either. Rather, Arc makes sense as an in-house GPU unit to pair with existing silicon (CPUs) and low / mid range dGPUs to compete where nVidia's left that market and where AMD has a lot of lunch to undercut.

One unfortunate note on Nvidia data center GPUs is to fully utilize features such as vgpu and multi-instance GPU, there is an ongoing licensing fee for the drivers.

I applaud Intel for providing fully capable drivers at no additional cost. Combined with better availability for purchase they are competing in the VDI space.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/discre...

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