After the launch of the i740 in 1998, Intel returned to the high-performance GPU market after 24 years, and released the Arc gaming graphics in March, since then there is one more player in the GPU market, the future may form AMD, NVIDIA and Intel tripod trend. The actual price in China is 1299 yuan, the performance review has been posted many times before, but the core obstacle of Intel graphics card is not the hardware, but the driver optimization, a bit more bugs.
So how exactly did Intel’s Arc graphics card have such problems? Charlie Demerjian, the founder of SemiAccurate, who has not been active for a long time, recently wrote a very powerful article, pointing out the true culprit of the various delays and bugs in the Arc graphics card.
According to him, Intel originally intended to release Arc graphics cards at the end of last year, but because of COVID-19 problems forced to postpone until this spring, the results encountered another bad thing, Intel had to stop business in Russia.
This stop does not matter, directly to Intel’s Arc graphics business encountered difficulties, because Intel has about 1200 employees in Russia, is one of Intel’s largest offices in Europe.
Many of these Russian employees are involved in software and driver work, not only involving such developmental tools as oneAPI and OpenVINO, but also shader compilation, one of the key components of the driver.
As Intel withdrew from the Russian market, although it gave support to the staff to relocate out of the country, this also seriously affected the work of the local staff, causing Intel’s driver team to become difficult to work with, which has led to the current driver disaster for Arc graphics cards.
Considering the style of SemiAccurate’s website, this thing is good for everyone to hear as a story, Intel’s official response is currently not available, whether it is really because of the departure of the 1200 employees in Russia led to the Arc graphics driver can not keep up, which has not been determined.
