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      2023 was the year that GPUs stood still

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 28 December - 11:28 · 1 minute

    2023 was the year that GPUs stood still

    Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

    In many ways, 2023 was a long-awaited return to normalcy for people who build their own gaming and/or workstation PCs. For the entire year, most mainstream components have been available at or a little under their official retail prices, making it possible to build all kinds of PCs at relatively reasonable prices without worrying about restocks or waiting for discounts. It was a welcome continuation of some GPU trends that started in 2022. Nvidia, AMD, and Intel could release a new GPU, and you could consistently buy that GPU for roughly what it was supposed to cost.

    That's where we get into how frustrating 2023 was for GPU buyers, though. Cards like the GeForce RTX 4090 and Radeon RX 7900 series launched in late 2022 and boosted performance beyond what any last-generation cards could achieve. But 2023's midrange GPU launches were less ambitious. Not only did they offer the performance of a last-generation GPU, but most of them did it for around the same price as the last-gen GPUs whose performance they matched.

    The midrange runs in place

    Not every midrange GPU launch will get us a GTX 1060 —a card roughly 50 percent faster than its immediate predecessor and beat the previous-generation GTX 980 despite costing just a bit over half as much money. But even if your expectations were low, this year's midrange GPU launches have been underwhelming.

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      After a chaotic three years, GPU sales are starting to look normal-ish again

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 4 December - 21:57 · 1 minute

    AMD's Radeon RX 7600.

    Enlarge / AMD's Radeon RX 7600. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

    It's been an up-and-down decade for most consumer technology, with a pandemic-fueled boom in PC sales giving way to a sales crater that the market is still gradually recovering from . But few components have had as hard a time as gaming graphics cards, which were near impossible to buy at reasonable prices for about two years and then crashed hard as GPU companies responded with unattainable new high-end products .

    According to the GPU sales analysts at Jon Peddie Research, things may finally be evening out. Its data shows that GPU shipments have returned to quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year growth after two years of shrinking sales. This is the second consecutive quarter this has happened, which "strongly indicates that things are finally on the upswing for the graphics industry."

    JPR reports that overall GPU unit shipments (which include integrated and dedicated GPUs) are up 16.8 percent from Q2 and 36.6 percent from a year ago. Dedicated GPU sales increased 37.4 percent from Q2. When comparing year-over-year numbers, the biggest difference is that Nvidia, AMD, and Intel all have current-generation GPUs available in the $200–$300 range, including the GeForce RTX 4060 , the Radeon RX 7600 , and the Arc A770 and A750 , all of which were either unavailable or newly launched in Q3 of 2022.

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      Intel’s $180 Arc A580 aims for budget gaming builds, but it’s a hard sell

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 10 October - 17:28 · 1 minute

    Intel's Alchemist GPU silicon, the heart of the Arc A750, A770, and now, the A580.

    Enlarge / Intel's Alchemist GPU silicon, the heart of the Arc A750, A770, and now, the A580. (credit: Intel)

    Intel's Arc GPUs aren't bad for what they are, but a relatively late launch and driver problems meant that the company had to curtail its ambitions quite a bit. Early leaks and rumors that suggested a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti or RTX 3070 level of performance for the top-end Arc card never panned out, and the best Arc cards can usually only compete with $300-and-under midrange GPUs from AMD and Nvidia.

    Today Intel is quietly releasing another GPU into that same midrange milieu, the Arc A580 . Priced starting at $179, the card aims to compete with lower-end last-gen GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 or AMD Radeon RX 6600, cards currently available for around $200 that aim to provide a solid 1080p gaming experience (though sometimes with a setting or two turned down for newer and more demanding games).

    The A580 is based on the exact same Alchemist silicon as the Arc A750 and A770 , but with just 24 of the Xe graphics cores enabled, instead of 28 for the A750 and 32 for the A770. That does mean it has the exact same 256-bit memory bus as those higher-end cards, attached to a serviceable-for-the-price 8GB pool of GDDR6 RAM. Reviews from outlets like Tom's Hardware generally show the A580 beating the RTX 3050 and RX 6600 in most games, but falling a little short of the RTX 3060 and RX 7600 (to say nothing of the RTX 4060 , which beats the Arc A750 and A770 in most games).

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      Review: AMD’s Radeon RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT are almost great

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 6 September, 2023 - 13:00

    AMD's Radeon RX 7800 XT.

    Enlarge / AMD's Radeon RX 7800 XT. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

    Nearly a year ago, Nvidia kicked off this GPU generation with its GeForce RTX 4090 . The 4090 offers unparalleled performance but at an unparalleled price of $1,600 (prices have not fallen). It's not for everybody, but it's a nice halo card that shows what the Ada Lovelace architecture is capable of. Fine, I guess.

    The RTX 4080 soon followed, along with AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT . These cards also generally offered better performance than anything you could get from a previous-generation GPU, but at still-too-high-for-most-people prices that ranged from between $900 and $1,200 (though all of those prices have fallen by a bit). Fine, I guess.

    By the time we got the 4070 Ti launch in May, we were getting down to the level of performance that had been available from previous-generation cards. These GPUs offered a decent generational jump over their predecessors (the 4070 Ti performs kind of like a 3090, and the 4070 performs kind of like a 3080). But those cards also got big price bumps that took them closer to the pricing levels of the last-gen cards they performed like. Fine, I guess.

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      Do Intel’s new graphics drivers actually overclock its low-end GPUs?

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 22 August, 2023 - 15:43 · 1 minute

    Intel's latest Arc GPU drivers do come with a firmware update, but contrary to most reports, it's not an "overclock."

    Enlarge / Intel's latest Arc GPU drivers do come with a firmware update, but contrary to most reports, it's not an "overclock." (credit: Intel)

    When we write about Intel's Arc GPUs, we're typically paying the most attention to the A750 and A770 because they're the cards that perform well enough that you might actually put them in an entry-level-to-midrange gaming desktop. But there's one other Arc graphics card of note: the lowly Arc A380, which snuck into some stores a few months before either high-end Arc card was released.

    With its eight Xe cores (down from 32 in the A770), 96-bit memory interface, and 6GB of RAM, the Arc A380 has been (in my case, literally) nothing to write home about. It's an entry-level graphics card that competes reasonably well with ancient and low-end cards like Nvidia's GeForce RTX 1650 and AMD's Radeon RX 6400, and its hardware-accelerated AV1 video encoding support makes it mildly interesting for people who work with video. It's one of the better GPUs you can get for $100, its current street price , but that's not saying much.

    But Intel's latest graphics drivers provided an update specifically for the A380 that seems notable because of how rare it is: the 31.0.101.4644 driver package released last week also includes a firmware update for A380 cards that seems to boost their base clock speed from 2,000 MHz up to 2,150 MHz. That's a 7.5 percent increase, supposedly being provided for free to all A380 owners with a simple firmware update. At least, it would be if it were an actual increase in the card's peak clock speed, which it isn't.

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      New Intel GPU drivers help address one of Arc’s biggest remaining weak points

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 18 August, 2023 - 13:00 · 1 minute

    Intel is playing up the cumulative performance improvements for DirectX 11 games since its Arc GPUs launched almost a year ago.

    Enlarge / Intel is playing up the cumulative performance improvements for DirectX 11 games since its Arc GPUs launched almost a year ago. (credit: Intel)

    When they launched last fall , Intel's drivers for its Arc dedicated graphics cards were in rough shape. The company's messaging at the time—and for months beforehand—was something along the lines of, "We're aware, and we're working on it."

    I tend to be skeptical of these kinds of " we'll fix it in post " promises; you should buy products based on what they do now and not what the manufacturer promises they will one day be able to do, especially for something like consumer graphics cards where there are plenty of alternatives. But credit where it's due, Intel has put quite a bit of work into improving its drivers in the year or so since the first Arc cards launched.

    Today the company has rounded up a collection of improvements made to its DirectX 11 drivers since launch, with a collection of games that run about 19 percent faster on average than they did last October. Though Arc's performance in modern DirectX 12 and Vulkan games has always been good for the price, older APIs like DirectX 9 and 11 were particular weak points of Arc's when compared to competing cards like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and 3060 series and the AMD Radeon RX 7600 and 6600 series.

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      Getting AAA games working in Linux sometimes requires concealing your GPU

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 9 August, 2023 - 17:57 · 1 minute

    Hogwarts Legacy screenshot

    Enlarge / There are some energies you should not tap for sorcery, something both Hogwarts students and Hogwarts Legacy installs running under Linux should know. (credit: Warner Bros. Games)

    Linux gaming's march toward being a real, actual thing has taken serious strides lately , due in large part to Valve's Proton-powered Steam Play efforts . Being Linux, there are still some quirks to figure out. One of them involves games trying to make use of Intel's upscaling tools.

    Intel's ARC series GPUs are interesting , in many senses of the word. They offer the best implementation of Intel's image reconstruction system, XeSS, similar to Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR. XeSS, like its counterparts, utilizes machine learning to fill in the pixel gaps on anti-aliased objects and scenes. The results are sometimes clear, sometimes a bit fuzzy if you pay close attention. In our review of Intel's A770 and A750 GPUs in late 2022, we noted that cross-compatibility between all three systems could be in the works.

    That kind of easy-swap function is not the case when a game is running on a customized version of the WINE Windows-on-Linux, translating Direct3D graphics calls to Vulkan and prodding to see whether it, too, can make use of Intel's graphics boost. As noted by Phoronix , Intel developers contributing to the open source Mesa graphics project added the ability to hide an Intel GPU from the Vulkan Linux driver.

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      Intel cuts Arc A750 GPU’s price while boasting about driver optimizations

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 1 February, 2023 - 14:00 · 1 minute

    The Arc A750 is slower than the top-tier A770, and it's getting a $40 price cut to make it more appealing.

    Enlarge / The Arc A750 is slower than the top-tier A770, and it's getting a $40 price cut to make it more appealing. (credit: Intel)

    It has been about four months since the launch of Intel's long-awaited Arc graphics cards . If you rolled the dice and bought a flagship A770 or an A750 in the interest of getting a decent deal on a mid-range GPU after two years of artificially inflated prices, the news has been mostly good. There have been some weird issues here and there , but Intel has kept plugging away at its buggy drivers, slowly improving Arc's performance across a range of games.

    The company is making a pair of announcements today. First, the Arc A750 (the third-fastest Arc card, behind the 16GB and 8GB versions of the A770) is getting an official price cut, from $289 to $249. Second, the company is releasing yet another driver update (version 31.0.101.4086), bragging about widespread performance improvements in old DirectX 9 games and more targeted improvements for newer titles relative to the launch drivers from October.

    In our review, the Arc A750 was usually around 10 or 20 percent slower than the 16GB version of the A770, at least for games where the A750's 8GB of memory wasn't a bottleneck. But in the games where it did well, it usually still outperformed Nvidia's RTX 3060, and Intel's driver updates have made the "games that Arc plays well" list a little longer by now. A new RTX 3060 still typically goes for somewhere in the $350 to $400 range.

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      Two months of Intel Arc driver updates begin to fix low performance in old games

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 7 December, 2022 - 18:06 · 1 minute

    Intel is talking up big performance gains in some old, but noteworthy, games.

    Enlarge / Intel is talking up big performance gains in some old, but noteworthy, games. (credit: Intel)

    In the run-up to the launch of Intel's Arc graphics cards, the company emphasized for months that the cards might not perform well in games that didn't use newer graphics APIs like Vulkan and DirectX 12. The GPUs are actually quite price-competitive with aging midrangers like Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 if you’re playing newer games, but performance in older games is mixed.

    For Intel Arc owners attracted to the cards’ price, salvation may come in the form of continued driver updates. Since the October launch of the A770 and A750 , Intel has released a handful of driver updates, each of which fixed specific bugs or provided small performance improvements in individual games. But in today's beta driver release (31.0.101.3959, for those keeping track), Intel is offering a "significant" boost in older DirectX9 titles , with frame rates that can improve by as much as 80 percent.

    DirectX9 was the graphics API of choice in the Windows XP era, and the Windows XP era lasted for a very long time. The API is also used in still-popular multiplayer games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive , League of Legends , Team Fortress 2 , and Starcraft II , making performance improvements in DirectX9 games particularly noteworthy.

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