 I am hands-on with the Intel Arc A770. This is their top spec gaming GPU, and it is very much an unreleased product. That means that our test systems needed to be disconnected from the internet, data collection needed to be disabled, and we will definitely need to avoid revealing any FPS counters so that we don't leak any sensitive performance numbers, if I care about keeping my promise. Oh. With that out of the way, is Intel Arc good? Should you be excited for when they launch? Probably soon. And should you listen to this segue to our sponsor? SmartDeploy, now powered by pdq.com. It's zero touch, zero headache PC management for IT. You can play windows, apps, and drivers from the cloud, no VPN required. Get your free subscription worth over $500 at smartdeploy.com slash Linus. We're gonna have that linked down below. I guess we can drop the pretense, right? Behind me are two systems with identical specs running the same game. One would expect then for them to have the same level of performance, but clearly based purely on my eyes and not on the clearly visible FPS counters, this one is performing a lot better. So what's going on here? The performance disparity between these two systems is actually a big part of the reason that Intel flew up here to show us the current state of things. The one on your right is running in DirectX 12 mode, while the other one is in DirectX 11. So rather than let me puzzle over why this would be, our good friends, Ryan Shrout and Tom Peterson sat down with us to talk about the state of things. The Arc team targeted new standards hard. We have AV1 decode and encode support, and our lightweight driver is very good at speaking directly to the GPU hardware in DX12 and Vulkan, making full use of its capabilities. By the way, the water in this insulated bottle is both cold and refreshing, lttstore.com. I made him say that. The part I'm not gonna make him say, remember my promise, is that in DirectX 11, and 10, and nine, and et cetera, that's not really the case. The thing is, in those earlier versions of DirectX, to ease development, there are loads of APIs and driver baggage between the game and the GPU. Now, the performance can obviously still be good, but it takes a lot of tweaking in the drivers and the game before it all works great, which competitors like Nvidia and AMD have had literally decades to work on. So the short version of the bad news then is that in a lot of situations, a game won't be taking full advantage of an Arc GPU. And one of the worst examples of this is here in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, where they drop half of the performance going from DX12 to DX11. Sorry, excuse me, my promise. They double going from DX11 to DX12. The point is, however they wanna spin it, there's a lot of work to be done, and this optimization dance isn't one that can be done alone, putting Intel in a very challenging predicament. The cold hard truth is that, unfortunately for Team Blue, gamers do not exclusively play DirectX 12 and Vulkan games, making Arc a bit of a tough sell until it's more optimized. As for game developers, well, why would they optimize for Arc unless there's a large enough install base? See the chicken and egg problem here? Let's talk about the three tier strategy that Intel is planning to use then to beat this chicken and egg into a delicious omelet. At what we're calling tier one, we're gonna kill everyone in price to performance. And in these tier one titles that work really well on Arc, we've already revealed some of them, we're gonna be best in class performance outright. Just like that Floatplane has, the best behind the scenes and exclusive LTT content, Floatplane.com. Let's take a look then at some of those tier one games. Here's Cyberpunk running at quick preset high and 1440p. Oh, wow, okay, that's a higher resolution than I was actually expecting them to want to show off here. Oh no, I don't have an FPS counter, but I could probably approximate it. It's hard for me to tell for sure. This has gotta be somewhere in the like 50 to 65 FPS range if I had to guess. Cyberpunk's a little chunky and a little terry and we're not using any kind of variable refresh rate right now. I'd say it's actually higher than that. Alex, what do you think? I agree. You agree, thanks. I fortunately turned on my FPS counter. Well, I'm just running a benchmark, but you know, that's my job. In F1 2021, we're getting what? 180 FPS at 1440p, high-ish settings. Which is impressive, but F1 2021 is a lighter title. Honestly, I'm more impressed by the fact that Cyberpunk is running at all given what a hog this game is. Now, these are tier one games though. They're not gonna let us show you any tier two games yet. So I have banished them from hosting any more of the video, but I am at least allowed to talk about them. The second tier is your less optimized games, but ones that are built on modern APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan. These are still gonna perform pretty well for the reasons that we discussed before. Tier three is where things get a little dicey. In DirectX 11 or earlier, ARK doesn't always do very well. And while we, sorry, had something in my eye there, weren't able to run any tier three games ourselves on the A770, there have been enough ARK performance leaks out there to show you that, yeah, it can be a little rough. But Intel has no illusions about this reality, and they know that gamers expect to play a wide variety of games that they can download at random out of the literally tens of thousands of titles on Steam, fired up and get acceptable bug-free performance. So being self-aware that there are going to be some ARK compromises and that there are some silicon surplus issues to work around, they have a bold plan and the actual real buckets of money to turn that bold plan into a reality. You guys ready? Intel is going to be basing their pricing off of their internal testing of third tier games. Now, they still won't tell us how much the A770 is going to cost, but what we do have is some data points that lead us to believe there are gonna be some pretty happy gamers. First up is the general state of the industry. Rumors abound that Nvidia is trying to cancel, or at least delay manufacturing of a large chunk of their upcoming 40 series GPUs. And it's pretty safe to say that given the recent mining crash, AMD is probably in a similar boat. We guess then that Intel probably also overproduced ARK silicon based on projections that they might have made during the surge in demand for gaming PCs during the extended COVID lockdowns over the last couple of years. I think then that it's pretty safe to say that aspirations for a large install base aside, they just plain have some inventory to move. Next, while the A770, especially this sexy limited edition RGB card, doesn't have an announced price or launch date, they have actually launched some ARK silicon. This is the A380 and its performance isn't particularly exciting, but its price is. Starting at $129 US dollars MSRP with six gigs of GDR six memory and enough performance for 1080P gaming and light titles, this thing would have been an absolute godsend during the shortages. And still, even without the shortages, presents a value proposition that I wouldn't have thought possible. It's an entry level GPU that you're not a complete idiot for buying. Next up is the rapidly improving state of ARK on the software side. The last time we looked at it, we said, and rightly so, sorry, that Intel should be embarrassed to launch a product in that state. But in the three short weeks since then, they have fixed almost every issue we raised and we have some background on what happened with a couple of them. First up was the problem with Windows update constantly rolling back our drivers. So what happened was there's all this random hardware on your platform, like all these chips, all these cards, right? And everything has an ID that Windows uses to find the right driver for your hardware. Every manufacturer has their own ID, it's a four digit string. Fun fact, Intel's is 8086. And then there's also an ID for the device itself. So that's easy then, right? This driver goes with this pair of IDs. Ta-da! Well, on laptops, there's kind of two manufacturers if you think about it, and therefore two sets of IDs. One for the silicon vendor and one for the system maker. Now there's a good reason for this. Historically, OEMs like Dell or HP needed to have unique IDs for their implementation of hardware like a GPU. Say to specify any power constraints or display output capabilities. That means that when Windows update found two driver matches for our GPU, one from Intel directly and one specific one from HP with both sets of IDs, it made sense that it would prefer the HP specific one to avoid any unintended driver woes for the user. The longterm fix for this then is that Intel's first party driver will need to take precedence and all OEMs will have to get on board. Wow, it must be nice to be Intel. As for the battery life issues, that's a bit more complicated and has to do with power states. G2 is a high power idle state, about 40 Watts. And that's where we were stuck. Now ARK supports G8, which is more like a 10 watt idle power state. But unfortunately, they were in the final stages of enabling that state in the driver. And so it wasn't there yet. It will be along with other fixes in August. Even with future driver updates though, there are some caveats that you potential ARK customers should be aware of. And I'd say the biggest one is your system's support for resizable bar. It's a feature that you enable in your bio. So you can go check if it's there and it's a bit complicated. So I'm not gonna go into the full details right now, but basically an ARK GPU's memory controller benefits a lot from being able to execute fewer larger data transfers rather than many, many smaller ones when it's loading textures, shaders, geometry, or anything else that goes from the CPU to the GPU. With that said, ARK also has some competitive advantages that we touched on in our last video and they haven't gone away. When it works, it is an encoding powerhouse. I mean, AV1 encoding in particular is the kind of thing that you're unlikely to care about today, but could actually be the difference between this thing is a paperweight and I could still use this in my secondary machine or my Plex server five, six, seven years from now. It also has a lot of dedicated silicon for machine learning driven features like AI upscaling. Though I wasn't able to test that either. What I can test is overclocking. Performance tuning. Performance tuning. Now do you note that they screwed it up and they don't have an apply thing. So just it's a live slider. It's a live slider. Oh, better not, you know. The performance boost, it basically it changes your VF curve. Am I right? Yeah. Okay. So if you have better silicon than normal. But again, this is a little early, but go for it. You know. Okay. Yeah, if you have better silicon than normal, you might be able to just boost it up a bit. So what, I just like find my game back up and I might have like boosted performance. Oh, I guess we can actually see our clocks. Am I allowed to show those? I'm not sure if that's working right, but maybe. Oh yeah, it seems to be locked. The GPU temperature is locked at 69 degrees Celsius. There's no way I believe that's an accident. No, no, no, I think that's true. That's true. You think that's true? Yeah. Nice. I don't think that CPU activity is right at 4% though. Yeah, that's got to be. Yeah, that's probably a little wrong. I can't tell. Is this placebo or is this actually a little faster? I think it is. I'm getting less tearing. I think it might actually be faster. I think it's working. Okay, you told me this wasn't going to work. Did it just crash on you? Well, try it more and you'll crash it. Well, there's no reason to have a temperature limit. I don't care about any of that. Okay, should I turn the power limit up? Yeah, why not? I mean, should be fine, right? Yeah, what could go wrong? Yeah, what could go wrong? So none of that changed. Yeah. Also, I think I'm getting more tearing, which doesn't necessarily actually mean that performance is worse. Tearing is a function of your frame rate versus your refresh rate and it's a little more complex and just better FPS tearing go away. But what I am seeing is, well, it looked like I was getting multiple tears for a second there, which could actually mean that our FPS went up. You saw that? Yes. Are you sure you didn't? If you hit Alt-I again, you can do it in game and you'll get a big display. Oh, it's working. Oh wait, it's working? Yeah, I guess this is bugged. Oh, this is working? Yeah. Oh, oh, well that's cool. It's very clear that this is definitely performing better than we started. So the overclocking utility works far better than Alex told me it was. I mean, should we give her more beans? Sure. What a great idea. Oh. Oh. See. That means it works though. Just like the segue to our sponsor. 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