Intel Arc Graphics A380: Compelling For Open-Source Enthusiasts & Developers At ~$139

[MadCatX]

Gamer's Nexus's review of their drivers really showed just how embarrassing and incompetent this product is. https://youtu.be/MjYSeT-T5uk
It's borderline non-functional.
Which I guess is normal for Intel.

Should I be getting the impression that Intel's Linux and Mesa driver software is actually better that their Windows equivalent?

BTW some of problems GN ran into are beyond ridiculous in 2022. I guess they need Copilot to write the control SW for them...

[coder]

Well, I for one am happy for the competition, even if it is a garbage card.

It's not garbage. For $140, you get:

• 3 Display Port 2.0 ports + 1 HDMI 2.1 port
• AV1 support
• Better performance than integrated graphics

For the price, it's a reasonable offering. If you need the connectivity or AV1 support and don't mind the performance, it's an easy decision.

The power connectors are not a bad thing. Remember that electricity always follows the path of least resistance, and as the card heats up, it will move from the bus to the port. And back again as the port heats up.

That's not how it works. In modern GPUs, the power draw is managed by a microcontroller in the GPU that decides how much power to draw from the bus vs. the supplemental connector. There was a minor scandal, during the launch of the RX 480, where its power draw from the PCIe rail would spike well over the allotted 75 W. IIRC, they managed to address it with a firmware update.

[coder]

I think the Nvidia Quadro P2000 is an interesting comparison point.

But you need a big asterisk, because its list price was apparently $525. The street price I found in one review was $425.

Also, it lacks AV1, HDMI, and its DisplayPort was v1.4.

I really want to see this performance in a single slot true 75W card with no external power delivery required.

Agreed.

Too bad it looks like the A370 is only a mobile product, because it otherwise seems to fit the bill.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us...-graphics.html

BTW, it's possible someone will release a version of the A380 without a supplemental power connector. This sort of thing has happened with other GPUs, in the past.

[ms178]

I'm not sure why some people seem to be cheering on the demise of Intel dGPUs. The duopoly we have now is not good for consumers.

Agreed, the last thing consumers want is a duopoly dictating prices and milking the market as we have seen during the last two years. I don't get all the whining from the companies about higher costs either, it's their job to drive costs down with their partners. The customers are not willing to pay up that bill indefinitely.

They are the only ones with their own fabs, so once they (incredibly slowly) unscrew their < 14nm fiasco, we would eventually end up with a 3rd player who isn't trying to compete with everyone in the world for TSMC capacity. That obviously isn't the case now and Intel needs TSMC just like everyone else, but the path to more GPUs available in the market is there.

That's going to be a long wait though and there were rumors going around that Intel might cancel Arc alltogether if they cannot get competitve and keep losing money. After all they just killed Optane just before CXL might have helped to get that off the ground. Let's hope they won't cancel the Arc program prematurely and get things fixed on the hardware and software side. The first generation always has teething issues, by the time Celestial hits the market is the right time to judge if Intel has a future in the dGPU market or not.

[birdie]

For $140 this seems like an okay card. Everyone shitting on it seems to forget: this is the FIRST generation, it's not surprising it doesn't match or exceed the performance of competitors who have decades of experience. This performs alright, but of course there's a ton of room for improvement that will hopefully come in the next generations. It's also not a top of the line card, as the pricing clearly reflects. It's also clear the drivers need some work, Vulkan seems to outperform the others by a large margin (the Portal 2 benchmark shows that). If the drivers get optimized, this will likely outperform the 1050 ti, maybe even be on par with a 1060, which for the price would be great (as an existing GTX 1060 user). I also want to point out, 6GB of VRAM in a card of this price range is very generous. TLDR: Yes this card clearly falls short, but there's hope for the future (and a clear path for improvement, primarily in the software/driver area).

	Intel A380	GTX 1060
Node	6nm	16nm
Transistors	7,200 million	4,400 million
Frequency	2450MHz	1700MHz
TDP	78W	116W

It is embarrassing. On paper it should be at the very least 1.5 times faster than GTX 1060. Only its Open Sourcedness for Linux users and TDP are going for it. Windows drivers are rife with issues and many games don't work at all, and that's where the majority of sales will be. Linux users don't register on the GPU market.

[ehansin]

I know a lot of people that get graphics cards are looking for maximum performance and understand why. But I'd love to see some Intel offerings power fully from the PCIe slot and passively (fanless) cooled. Maybe these would then not be performance competitive with CPU integrated graphics, and as such not be worth it. I don't know enough to know where that "line" is.

[birdie]

People keep touting hardware AV1 encoding support however not a single video content/streaming website supports its natively.

Twitch, Vimeo and pretty much all other such websites? H.264 only
Youtube? AV1 is only for offline 4K/8K videos which YouTube reencodes from your source video. They will not use your AV1 source as is. Streaming is in H.264 exclusively.

There's zero demand for a HW AV1 encoder now. None. And according to tests Intel's HW AV1 encoder is only marginally better than H.264 for certain bitrates. x264, x265 and all AV1 encoders all leave it in the dust for offline software encoding. It's a feature no one needs and can use for anything useful.

And don't get me started on the fact that absolute most consumer devices still don't support HW AV1 decoding. And software AV1 decoding is quite computationally expensive, so there's no way on Earth YouTube will offer it for mobile devices any time soon (unless you use an alternative YouTube client).

[d3coder]

Card looks interesting. I wonder how good it will be when they fix driver performance for OpenGL and DX.
Michael, can you test windows games with DXVK and compare it to native windows dx or maybe with windows and dxvk? L4D2 and Portal 2 use DXVK for their Vulkan renderer and they got noticeable bump in perf.

[user1]

BTW some of problems GN ran into are beyond ridiculous in 2022.

Yeah, I was blown away the most by the fact that you need an internet connection just to install the driver.
When I used Windows, the first thing I did before Windows installation is to disconnect my ethernet cable, so that Windows with its retarded driver delivery methods doesn't automatically install some year and a half old version of AMD drivers. This way I could directly install the latest driver that I wanted.

[ET3D]

What OpenCL 3.0 features does the A380 support? Because basic OpenCL 3.0 is just OpenCL 1.2. Most features are optional. It's hard to get excited without knowing if the card can actually do anything beyond OpenCL 1.2 functionality.