Thanks to a new version of DX9 optimized drivers and price repositioning, Intel’s mid-range ARC 750 graphics card could offer the best performance/price ratio on the market. What finally seduce gamers?
ARC graphics cards, finally a (real) good deal for players who do not want to put a minimum wage in their GPU? This is what Intel hopes to prove with two announcements concerning its ARC 750 8GB card, the “champion” of its first generation of graphics cards for gamers. After an early career marred by schedule delays, driver concerns, a starting price a little weighed down by inflation and the worries inherent in the launch of any new product category, the ARC 750 wants to reveal.
Read also: ARC: Intel leaks its graphics chip roadmap, which will go upmarket (January 2023)
he first good news lies in the price positioning, which goes from $299 excluding tax to $249 excluding tax – an overall reduction, but the effect of which will take some time to spread depending on the country. This drop should allow the card to be placed below 300 € in France excluding promotions – it is already sometimes found around 290 €. In addition to excellent performance in Direct X12 games, this price could be even more interesting thanks to the second announcement: Intel has worked hard to develop new drivers for old games: the 4086. And has thus filled a major flaw in its graphics cards, namely compatibility with old games.
Exploding DirectX9 performance
The Achilles heel of Intel GPUs is their modernity. Embedding a microarchitecture developed with small onions for DirectX 12 Ultimate, hardware units for ray-tracing and other refinements like a powerful multimedia engine, the ARC 750 and 770 chips could not develop their power in the old games based on Direct X9. If the titles remained largely playable, the cards could not bear the comparison with the GeForces or the Radeons whose drivers have benefited from years of fine-tuning.
This maturation of its drivers is the result of the hard work of the engineers, who went to tear off the missing frames per second with forceps. By working on the most important titles of the DX9 generation with its new drivers stamped 4086. As The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which sees its frame rate increase by 77% compared to the 3490 drivers of the launch. Same gain of +77% for the game CS:GO and another gain of 71% for its “engine brother”, Half Life 2 +71%), also based on Valve’s Source engine. We will also note 45% more images per second for the very important League of Legends.
These “raw” gains are accompanied by a better frame creation latency (the time it takes for the system to create the images, which sometimes varies enormously depending on the complexity of the frames). According to Intel performance metrics, the 4086 drivers released today average gain of +42% frames per second and 60% improved latency with advertised games compared to the original drivers. Small (big) detail that is still important: the performance measurements here are based on a machine equipped with a Core i9. It remains to be seen to what extent the nature (and power) of your processor affects the gains. Still, Intel seems to have a double advantage here over Nvidia’s RTX3060 12 GB. The queen of graphics cards for gamers that is at the same time less powerful in the vast majority of games. And which is displayed between 400 and 500 €.
Some problems solved, others insolvent… but the work continues
However, one problem has not been solved: the consumption of the card when idle. If it does not heat up excessively in full use, it has been noted by all the testers that it consumes more than its competitors when it is not doing anything. “IThere is a limitation here caused by two things. On the one hand, it is absolutely necessary that the user activates the ASPM (1) in the motherboard BIOS », explains Tom Petersen, Fellow at Intel (the highest rank of engineers in the company). ” But from a certain screen size, the bandwidth required to refresh the image forces the activation of too large a portion of our chip. It’s related to the microarchitecture of the Alchemist GPUs and against that, we won’t be able to do anything in software “Explains very directly and honestly the cador of GPUs and former Nvidia.
Apart from the fact that the consumption of the cards is not delusional either – a few tens of watts in the worst case – this architectural error will benefit future graphics cards. Asked by 01net.com about the impact his team has on the development of the next and second generation of “Battlemage” GPUs, Tom Petersen adds ” that’s the positive side of all these returns: we have enough to influence the next GPUs and yes, this kind of defect will be taken into account. » An engineer who explains that « you can do whatever you want in the lab, nothing beats user feedback. We had to jump into the water and correct everything that happened to us. For DirectX 9, the bulk of the work is now behind us. We now have to work on the interface of our drivers “.
There too, the community raises its dissatisfaction in the superimposed appearance (we say overlay) of these drivers. And here again, Tom Petersen speaks frankly and simply: ARC Control and its graphical interface did not fulfill their mission and did not meet user expectations. Know that the team is working hard to transform and improve them. I won’t give you a release schedule so as not to disappoint. But here too, improvements and changes are in progress and they are coming “says the engineer.
In the past, doubt about this kind of promises was allowed. But after having launched its cards well (while it was held out of office), met its objectives in terms of price and heat dissipation, kept its technological promises (in particular in terms of DX12 games and ray-tracing) and corrected most of the youth defects (especially DX9 games), Intel is going to launch a new graphic interface for its drivers. And continue to grow. Until succeeding in really overshadowing Nvidia and AMD?
(1): The ASPM or Active State Power Management is an energy saving mechanism controlled by the PCI Express controller of the machine. As soon as the traffic drops or ceases between two components, this system switches certain elements of the machine to low-power mode.
