After upgrading the driver version of the Intel Arc A380 graphics card, the graphics card frequency increased from 2000 MHz to 2150 MHz, an increase of 7.5%.

Intel released the 31.0.101.4669 WHQL graphics driver today, which fixes the problem of increased frequency of the Arc A380 graphics card and returns to the default clock frequency.

The driver updates content as follows:

 Updated Game On driver for Intel Arc A series graphics cards to add support for Armored Core 6 Realm Skyfire game.

Fix the following issues:

Game support:

Updated Game On driver for Intel Arc A series graphics cards to add support for Armored Core 6 Realm Skyfire game. Fix the following issues:

 Fixed an issue where Tomb Raider (DX11) could experience a crash after loading into the game menu.

 Fixed an issue where some Arc A380 graphics cards incorrectly reported clock frequency values beyond the default.

Known Issues

 Uncharted: A Rogue Legend Collection (DX12) game may have texture corruption issues with some character rendering.

 Halo: Infinite (DX12) may crash on certain configurations.

 Dead by Daylight (DX11) may crash during gameplay.

 Topaz Video AI may experience errors when performing video enhancement with certain graphics card models.

 Adobe After Effects may experience an application crash during rendering operations.

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Pat Gelsinger revealed that Raja Koduri will launch a currently unnamed AI startup on his own with a core focus on “generating AI content for games, media and entertainment.

Raja Koduri responded by thanking Pat Gelsinger for his time at Intel and said he would be announcing more information about the startup in the coming weeks.

Intel poached Koduri from AMD in 2017 to serve as chief GPU architect, thus setting Intel up for long-term success in the GPU space.

He helped Intel develop its own dedicated GPU, which it eventually named Arc in 2021, and last year launched its first Arc desktop-alone graphics, the entry-level Arc A380. unfortunately, Intel graphics have not made much of a splash in the GPU space, with NVIDIA and AMD still dominating.

It was found a few days ago that the Blue Halberd Intel Arc A380 graphics card has been significantly reduced in price, Jingdong Plus members arrived at 799 CNY, a lot lower than the first launch of 1149 CNY.

In terms of parameters, the card is equipped with Intel Arc A380 GPU, 8 Xe cores, GPU frequency of 2000MHz, 6GB 96bit GDDR6 memory, interfaces including 3 DP + 1 HDMI, 75W TBP, no external power supply.

According to Intel, the Intel Arc A380 GPU supports the full range of DirectX 12 Ultimate features including AV1 hardware acceleration and hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and provides a smooth gaming experience above 1080p @60fps when running mainstream games such as League of Legends, Neverwinter, Skyward Sword and Jedi.

According to Blue Halberd’s instructions, the Resizable Bar Above 4G Decoding option must be enabled to use this card (Resizable Bar is a feature that improves the efficiency of accessing the on-board GPU memory through the PCI Express bus). The installed system should choose 64-bit Win10 21H2 and above, the latest version of Win11 is recommended, and it is recommended to use Intel 400 series motherboards or above to better utilize the performance of the graphics card.

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While Intel has been working hard to tune its Arc GPU performance in modern APIs such as DX12 and Vulkan, older games using DX11, DX12 and OpenGL APIs have not been well supported to date.

Lisa Pearce, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Visual Computing Division, said Intel is working to “optimize Arc GPU performance” for the APIs of DirectX 9 and 11. DirectX 11 and 12 are similar, but the updated APIs offer more optimizations and fixes not available in previous versions. DirectX 11 and 12 are similar, but the updated API offers more optimizations and fixes that were not available in previous versions. For some gamers, the plethora of older games is great because now gamers can try some of the award-winning games for themselves. However, for older games, users don’t need a powerful graphics card because the technology is less advanced.

A little over a week ago, Intel released a new driver that eliminated many of the graphics card and control panel compatibility inconsistencies that have not been well received in the PC community. Once again, Intel seems to be “catching up” with NVIDIA and AMD on their specific GPU technologies. With the help of comments and other feedback from the technical community, Intel is improving the compatibility that exists with the Arc A380.

The post How compatible is the Intel Arc A380? 50 games tested in real life appeared first on TechGoing.

(Pictured from @ASRock ASRock Technology official Weibo)

In terms of interface, ASRock Arc A380 Challenger ITX graphics card provides standard 1×HDMI 2.0b + 3×DisplayPort 2.0 (supports DSC display stream compression).

Surprisingly, ASRock recommends a 500W full power supply for the card, and the GPU frequency, although listed as 2250 MHz, the official GPU-Z screenshot shows a boost to 2450 MHz.

In the Furmark stress test, the temperature of the ASRock Arc A380 Challenger ITX graphics card can be suppressed to 78℃. Given that the card only has a rather thin single slot / single air cooler, the actual performance is quite surprising to us.

8-pin external power supply design / actual TDP unknown

In addition, ASRock officially shared several games and 3DMark benchmark test results, but the actual performance of the card is slightly lower than the Arc A380 Photon of Blue Halberd (the latter is also 8-pin external power supply @ 2.45 GHz / 92W TDP).

3DMark – Time Spy

In the 3DMark “Time Spy” benchmarking project, ASRock Arc A380 Challenger ITX graphics card scored 4426, while the Blue Halberd scored over 5000.

3DMark – Time Spy Extreme

WCCFTech speculates that some of the power/clock frequency differences between the two cards were not observed by us in the foreground.

3DMark – Fire Strike

In addition different versions of drivers (such as the latest optimized test version provided to reviewers in priority) may also affect the final score.

3DMark – Fire Strike Extreme

For gaming, the Arc A380 delivers a 1080p experience at over 60 / 100 FPS in most situations.

Although the performance in 3A / high-quality scenes may be tuned to around 50-60 FPS, this is sufficient for most gamers on a budget.

Finally, the current official guide price of the Intel Arc A380 graphics card is around 1299 RMB, interested parties can buy the normal / ITX version as needed, and also hope that Intel officials can continue to optimize the driver and fix various bugs.

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AV1 encoding is a new generation of video encoding standards developed in cooperation with Google, Microsoft, Apple and other companies, better than H.264/265, smaller capacity and lower bandwidth requirements at the same image quality, AMD, NVIDIA and Intel also support AV1, but the lack of support for low-end cards, which gives the Intel A380 graphics card an advantage.

Video blogger EposVox did a test for this, using Nifty’s VMAF benchmark tool to analyze the AV1 encoding performance of the three, comparing the video quality at 3.5Mbps, 6Mbps, and 8Mbps bit rates, with higher scores being better.

In this test, NVIDIA’s NVENC encoder is the worst performer, with scores of 71 and 85 at 3.5M and 6Mbps respectively. AMD graphics cards are similar to NV’s encoder, and slightly worse, while the Intel A380 graphics card is the best performer, with scores of 83 and 90.

The only thing that comes close to the Intel A380 graphics card is the score under OBS’s x264 VerySlow H.264 preset, which received quality scores of 78 and 88 respectively, but this preset requires a lot of CPU resources and cannot be processed in real-time, so it is meaningless for live streaming.

The post Intel Arc graphics card AV1 encoding table actual test, 1299 yuan is not a loss appeared first on TechGoing.

Igor writes in the report (original in German)

"I asked a number of dealers, potential distributors and manufacturers in Europe about Intel's Arc card and the plans of these companies in this regard. However, in most cases, they had little or no interest in starting an adventure with this new product."

It’s been a long time since the Arc graphics card scores and test results leaked. But Microsoft still hasn’t offered any price guarantees. In addition, it does not offer a competitive enough package for RMA, which makes their GPU lineup a risky investment. Without interest from commercial customers, the board partners may decide to stop the whole project in the future.

The report also states that “at least 1 major motherboard partner has stopped producing Intel graphics cards altogether due to quality issues”. This is for the first generation of the Arc series of Alchemist first-generation GPUs.

The company also has a large unsold inventory. This includes products such as graphics cards and motherboards. However, this suggests that a lot of money is being spent on holding that inventory, leaving less financial support for experimental parts such as the Arc product line.

So far, Intel has only released one graphics card, the Arc A380, which is an inexpensive GPU that is currently only available in China. That’s because it has partnered with OEMs and system integrators to launch its products.

More and more problems are making it difficult for Intel to follow its own timeline. Board members have stopped marketing and it looks like the Arc series is not a good path for Intel to follow.

The post Media View: Intel’s Arc solo dream is on the verge of collapse appeared first on TechGoing.

The striped axial fan’s blade stripe structure and polished bottom surface are optimized to provide greater airflow, stronger cooling effect, and also support intelligent start/stop.

In terms of specifications, the core frequency is pre-exceeded to 2250MHz, which is 200MHz lower than the Blue Halberd’s, but still higher than the public version, and also paired with a large 96-bit 6GB GDDR6 memory with an equivalent frequency of 15.5GHz and a single 8-pin auxiliary power supply.

The output ports provide four, including one HDMI 2.0b, three DisplayPort 2.0, and can output 8K resolution.

The price is also $1299, the same as the Blue Halberd.

The post ASRock Intel Arc A380 graphics card on sale: single fan good figure appeared first on TechGoing.

Apple Silicon has delivered pretty impressive CPU performance before, and while the GPU is also quite large and powerful, there are some areas where it falls a little short.

For example, compared to NVIDIA RTX 30 series cards, the M1 Max’s graphics rendering time can be nearly 1/3 worse.

Although the Intel Arc GPU has considerable room for improvement at the driver optimization level, the M1 Max’s video decoding unit performance is only half that of the 1299 RMB priced DG2 in extreme cases of ultra-high bit rates.

However, at lower bit rates, the difference between the two is much smaller. In addition, it should be noted that M1 Max has two media units as well as DG2.

Therefore, when decoding more than two video streams in parallel, their frame rates can be easily doubled, which is more conducive to smooth playback during video editing.

Video decoder performance comparison (Photo by: David Huang)

David Huang did not further test formats such as HEVC 422 / 444 or ProRes, after all, Apple still has a huge advantage in this area, not to mention the actual sales reputation of M1 SoC is much higher than Intel GPU.

After many jumps, Intel DG2 still has quite a few problems in terms of driver and ISV adaptation. For example, some UP owners have complained that software such as Da Vinci may pass a splash screen when exporting videos.

In contrast, Apple’s software support is much better. And even if Intel’s video playback performance is slightly better, the lead is relatively limited — the advantage over Apple Silicon is not as significant as with AMD VCN.

Finally, for the data in the charts, at Jellyfish 4K HEVC @ 30fps frame rate / 400Mbps bitrate, and at Station B 4K HEVC HDR @ 120fps frame rate / 14Mbps bitrate.

"● Apple M1 Max -- 61 bitrate.

● Intel Arc A380 GPU -- 118 bitrate."

Also in video streaming projects, both behave similarly.

"● Apple M1 Max -- 417 bitrate.

● Intel Arc A380 GPU -- 542 bitrate."

Finally, if you don’t use much of the Apple Silicon SoC and Apple software ecosystem in real life, the combination of Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA configurations and application scenarios are still much richer.

The post Tests show Intel Arc A380 video decoder outperforms Apple M1 Max appeared first on TechGoing.

One of them is ASRock’s Arc A380, with a miniature stature, a single fan on the front, an aluminum heatsink visible on the side, and an 8-pin power connector, which is much smaller than the dual-fan version of the Blue Halberd.

However, probably because of confidentiality restrictions, the owner did not disclose the specific specifications of the card, nor did he test the score.

Interestingly, this server motherboard has three PCIe 4.0 x16 slots, so it also plugs in an ASRock RX 6400, an ASUS TUF RTX 3090 (original to do deep computing), and the motherboard’s integrated Aspeed AST 2600 BMC GPU, giving this system four different graphics cards from four families.

The funniest part is that the I-card blue, A-card red, and N-card green, the optical trio of primary colors come together, and the Intel Arc Control Center can also display N-card and A-card at the same time, which is very lively.

The processor is AMD Zen3 architecture of the Skyline 7T83, 64 cores 128 threads, frequency 2.45-3.5GHz, 256MB of tertiary cache, thermal design power consumption 280W, in the task manager is quite spectacular.

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