 Intel talks about quality a lot. Today, they had the opportunity to walk that talk, and this is what it looked like. You know how we mock Apple for going out on stage year after year after year, this year's iPhone is the best iPhone that we have ever created. It's ridiculous, right? Obviously the new one is better and water is also wet, right? Well, after seeing this laptop, I'm never gonna laugh at that again, because thanks to Intel's long awaited ARC A370 discrete GPU, the new Spectre X360 from HP is actually worse than the old RTX 3050 model, and not just by a little bit. Now, slow, that I could overlook, but buggy to the point where Alex described some of its functions as barely working, that's an embarrassment for any organization, let alone one the size of Intel. Now, obviously these are very strong claims we're making here, but don't worry, unfortunately, we've got receipts, and we'll show them to you after this word from our sponsor, ViewSonic. Their elite XG321UG mini LED monitor offers a 4K native resolution IPS panel with a 144 Hertz refresh rate, and it comes with G-Sync Ultimate R4 and a Quantum Dot color layer, so it's great for gamers or creators. Learn more at the link down below. ["Skyward Role"] ["Skyward Role"] ["Skyward Role"] ["Skyward Role"] ["Skyward Role"] ["Skyward Role"] ["Skyward Role"] ["Skyward Role"] ["Skyward Role"] ["Skyward Role"] ["Skyward Role"] As the writer of this video, I want to make it clear that I did not want to do this. I've had lengthy calls with Intel's engineers and worked really hard to show the strengths of Intel's ARC, because I'm excited for it. I was two years old the last time a new player entered the discrete GPU market, and I was not sure it would ever happen again, but it was helpful. I wanted this to be positive, because AMD and Nvidia's duopoly has been in clear need of some disruption, but unfortunately, I can only review the hardware that's in front of me. And it's a dumpster fire. The naming scheme for ARC graphics goes ARC 3, ARC 5, and ARC 7. So the A370M in our Spectre X360 16-inch is kind of like the best of their i3 tier discrete GPUs. Follow along so far? Good. Based on its positioning then, Intel had no expectations that it would be able to beat the RTX 3050 in gaming. And they were correct about that. In our testing, the 3050 is a solid 30% faster in games, despite being confined to the same chassis, which wouldn't be a problem, except that the ARC equipped version is priced $80 higher. Oh, and also in certain games, even AMD's integrated graphics are able to beat it. With that said, this performance level is kind of acceptable, given that Intel isn't really marketing this as a gaming card. At 1080p on medium to low settings, you can get a playable experience in most games. And aside from occasional stuttering, we barely saw any driver issues. I mean, Intel wasn't expecting to beat Nvidia at gaming. Instead, they wanna leverage hardware encoders to beat them at content creation. And it's to the point where 40% of the die area is actually dedicated to non-traditional gaming things. Let's talk about that. Each Intel ARC GPU is made up of render slices. And the main difference between a low end and a high end GPU from Intel is the number of render slices. So the A370M has eight of them. In each render slice, you'll find four XE cores that are comprised of 16 XE vector engines. These are what take care of rendering your games, each being roughly equivalent to an execution unit in Intel's IGPUs. You'll also find 16 XE matrix engines, which are dedicated to AI tasks like upscaling. Along with the four XE cores, you get four ray tracing units, along with some other stuff to, you know, make it actually work as a GPU. All of this hardware dedicated to AI and matrix manipulation means then that in tasks like Topaz Video Enhance AI, video encoding and up sampling should work incredibly well. And they do. Doubling the resolution of this Floatplane exclusive video that we downloaded at 480p actually gave us a small win for Intel. We got 0.22 seconds per frame compared to Nvidia's 0.24. Or at least we did when the Intel system worked. Most of the time, Nvidia won by simply not crashing. In DaVinci Resolve, Intel was able to leverage their AV1 encoders though, to pull out a huge win against the 3050. Though again, this was by default because you can't do AV1 encoding on the 3050. So we have no way to compare performance apples to apples. Not to mention that AV1 encoding is only just beginning to find its usefulness in 2022. Can't say the same about the WAN hoodie though. It's full of pockets and looks awesome. Lttstore.com. In Handbrake, we, well, let's just say the numbers that we are about to show you took three days of back and forth with Intel's engineers. As of June 22nd, 2022, here's what you ARK owners out there, all dozens of you will need to do to use Handbrake. First, get the latest drivers, not from Windows Update, not from Intel's driver utility, but rather you will need to check a blog post to see if they've posted anything new. Then you'll need the latest nightly version of Handbrake off of GitHub. The mainline version does not support Intel ARK yet. At this point, you'll have to be very, very careful not to let Windows Update run. Because for whatever reason, Windows Update will roll back the GPU drivers to an older version. And if this happens, it will completely break Handbrake and you'll have to uninstall and remove everything from AppData and start over. Once all of that's complete, you can set up your render. Nvidia's RTX 3050 was able to render out that 4K Floatplane exclusive, which by the way, you can watch if you go over to floatplane.com in 10 minutes and one seconds. Then with the same settings, our Intel ARK A370M didn't get past 0%. The video memory filled up and then nothing happened. After a call with Intel's engineers, we realized that we had used a strange resolution. And by using a different 1080p file, the A370M actually completed that video encode in just two thirds the time of the 3050. Wow. So when Intel is able to get their video encoders to consistently work, ARK might be a compelling value for video editors. Or maybe as an encoding co-processor, if you have a real GPU in your system. The real disappointment here though, isn't that a developer version of Handbrake doesn't encode weird resolutions. It's that Windows will screw up your drivers. Remember that whole Windtel Alliance thing? I mean, if there's one thing I expect from Intel, it's that they're gonna work with Microsoft to give you a seamless experience out of the box. This was anything but. Anywho, another way to leverage ARK's AI capabilities is XE Super Sampling. It's Intel's take on Nvidia DLSS and it sounds great, especially when you've got an underpowered GPU that needs all the up sampling that it can do. The problem is that it needs to be enabled on a per game basis. Oh, and also it isn't available yet. So even though there's a bunch of apparently very impressive AI hardware on the A37E-M, the software side is so incomplete that we weren't able to show you a single demo of that hardware. I'm kind of reminded of Nvidia's RTX launch, except that that included a really fast GPU as well. One area Intel should excel though is power management. In laptops, there's a very small budget for power compared to desktops and making sure that that power is shared between the CPU and GPU properly can net you more performance and better battery life across the board. To achieve this, Intel ARK laptops have a control loop that monitors what the CPU and the GPU are doing and assigns power targets every 100 milliseconds. GPU activity is the main driver here and they'll give the GPU more power until it starts to be starved for utilization, at which point they'll start allocating power budget back to the CPU. Now, currently on gaming laptops, setting your CPU and GPU power targets independently can net you 15% more FPS if you absolutely nail that balance. Can also lose you 15% performance if you get it wrong. So this is a welcome addition. Now, Nvidia does have a similar feature called Dynamic Boost 2.0, but on paper, Intel's approach will allow for much greater flexibility when it comes to power allocation. Except that in our testing, the old Spectre X360, remember with the Nvidia GPU and also further hampered by an 11th gen CPU, got better battery life. In talking to both Intel and HP, this shouldn't have happened. But in talking to Intel more, so many aspects of this review should have gone better and yet they didn't. So it's clear that Intel needs more time to get the bugs ironed out, which raises the question, why is this for sale? Well, from our point of view, Intel is kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place here. On the one hand, they've got to get the software right. If somebody buys an Intel GPU today and has a terrible experience, you can bet they're not gonna be back for round two when Battlemage drops, even if it does end up being competitive with the best from AMD and Nvidia. But then at the same time, they have to get these out the door before Nvidia's RTX 4000 series is announced. The last thing they wanna do is launch their top-end ARC A780 only to have it get embarrassed by an RTX 4050 Ti. They also can only find so many problems in their own lab. So yeah, I guess this is me saying the quiet part out loud. The people that buy an ARC GPU now are essentially beta testers for Intel. Alex alone has now found multiple bugs that are now in the queue to be fixed. It's just too bad that the timeline slipped so far. If they had actually been able to release this in Q1 like they had planned, I'm sure loads of gamers would have been okay being an early adopter, just to get their hands on literally anything to play games with. Now with GPU prices getting back to MSRP, or in some cases even below, that early adopter tax, it's gonna be a lot harder to swallow. Does this mean then that Intel's ARC GPUs are a complete dud? Well, no. Something everyone seems to have kind of forgotten at this point is how terrible Ryzen was when it first launched. There were firmware bugs. We had multiple motherboards just spontaneously brick. You needed super specific RAM sticks even to get it to post. And even then, that RAM probably couldn't run at its rated speed, despite Ryzen being so reliant on fast memory to perform well. I mean, heck, there were USB bugs that have only been recently sorted out. So I don't wanna count out Intel's ARC just yet. I mean, if you think about it, it's truly incredible that Intel was able to ship a discrete GPU at all. And I genuinely hope that in a year, we're gonna be praising it. But today, like Alex said, we can only review the hardware in front of us and I just can't. Fresh books. When you're building a business you're passionate about, it's easy to feel like there aren't enough hours in the day. And if you're doing all the invoicing and accounting on your own, you're probably spending time on work you don't love. Fresh books is built for business owners like you. 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