Intel's New Brand For High Performance Discrete Graphics: Arc

[Dr. Righteous]

*Yawn*
Man oh man. How long as it been that Intel has been promising a graphics solution to compete with AMD and Nvidia?
Waiting on benchmarks........................

[torsionbar28]

As a welder, Lincoln is the Arc brand I normally think of

As an old DEC guy, to me ARC is the firmware you run on an Alpha when you want to boot Win NT. Dumb marketing name for a Gfx card either way.

[skeevy420]

There is no friction in a Arc dude. As a welder you should know that.

/s

Until your lead or wire touches (safety glasses)

[evil_core]

Maybe I've just been lucky, but I've bought three used "miner" cards at super low prices in the past few years with no issues. It's my understanding that miners will re-flash the card with a firmware that reduces voltages and fan speeds to get the most performance/watt out of the cards. Two of the ones I bought were sold with full disclosure and after I flashed back to factory (and replaced one fan on one) they have been working fine. The third wasn't advertised as a mining card but it was obviously detuned, and flashing the firmware back to stock got it back in shape too. They were all Radeon cards, btw.

I guess they were Vega 56 or 64 cards, right?

[Dr. Righteous]

As a welder, Lincoln is the Arc brand I normally think of

Do you mean The dreaded Tombstone??

[kaidenshi]

I guess they were Vega 56 or 64 cards, right?

No, actually I've never owned a Vega card. One was a RX 580, one a RX 560, and one a R9 380 (that last was the one I had to replace a fan on, it was physically broken). The 580 was the one the guy neglected to mention was a mining card but it had a non-standard firmware revision and kept crashing in games, so I reflashed to stock and it's humming along nicely now. The 380 now lives on in my living room PC and the 560 is in my Slackware workstation.

[stormcrow]

This is a highly competitive space even with the duopoly the market currently has. AMD and Nvidia more or less keep each other somewhat honest - despite benchmark cheating. Intel doesn't really know much about competitive markets, they withdraw from most markets rather than compete and dominate those they stay in. AMD can only barely keep them competitive in the CPU market. Makes me wonder what happens when they release and, if it's another bad (or even mediocre) product like i740 & Larabee, will they just take their ball and go home yet again like the petulant kid they often appear to be instead of sticking it out and compete in subsequent iterations on price, performance, and developer outreach. They can have the best hardware GPU platform ever, but if developers can't be wooed away from Nvidia or AMD, it won't matter.

[Teggs]

I don't want anything Arcing inside my system, thank you. As for Battlemage: Jesus H Cringe, Intel. It's not as if everyone will use these to play the Elder Scrolls VI or other fantasy RPGs. Actual professionals and a lot of people who game on computers will not appreciate having to tell people they have a Battlemage in their system. They may even avoid acquiring one for that reason alone. What a silly own goal.

[DanL]

I have to ask, WTF is "frictionless gaming"? Is that a gaming PC without a fan or actively moving parts so there is no friction? Magnetic parts to remove mechanical friction? A buzzword?

I suspect it's some kind of hybrid scheme that requires an Intel chipset and CPU. Marketers playing monopoly..

[Danielsan]

Are these new GPU meant for general 3D acceleration (e.g. Blender and video-games) or are targeting d ML & AI garbage?