When it comes to Intel Arc GPUs, the hardware definitely has potential, so let’s hope that Intel will be able to work out the kinks in the drivers soon enough. On the one hand, it’s great that such a huge performance boost is on the way on the other hand, this was a pretty big oversight with a clear impact on graphics performance. The news about Intel driver fixes is something of a double-edged sword. There are still some software optimizations to be made before the graphics cards are released to a wider audience. The company revealed in a recent Linus Tech Tips video that it went all-in on DirectX12 compatibility, which is part of the reason why many games just don’t do well on Intel Arc. In the meantime, various Intel graphics cards are being spotted in benchmarks, some of which are released by Intel. Intel is set to attend LANfest in Colorado with a gaming bus filled with Arc-based computers, so the end of September seems like a safe bet, but the launch might happen even before that. Although the GPUs, which have been plagued by various delays, are still scarcely available, they will likely reach the end market sometime soon. Intel Arc, in general, seems to struggle with driver optimization.
Graphic card benchmark linus update#
The update will roll out to end users by the end of August, and while that’s still a while from now, it’s likely to be enough time before customers are able to buy the new Intel Arc GPUs in any major capacity. These messy transfers had a massive impact on the ray tracing performance of the graphics card.Īdding the bit of code to Mesa 22.2 should bring tangible improvements. The benchmark immerses a user into a magical steampunk. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system's potential under maximum heat output. However, due to the oversight, the Vulkan driver was moving data to the slower offboard system memory and then back. Heaven Benchmark is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. Normally, the Vulkan driver would make sure that Vulkan ray tracing tasks would be allocated to the discrete Intel GPU. Landwerlin is an Intel Linux graphics driver engineer who has years of experience under his belt, but this time the fix was relatively small - all it took was one line of code to achieve, as Landwerlin put it, “like a 100x (not joking) improvement.” It all comes down to a problem with memory allocation.ĭue to something as simple as a missing line of code, the memory allocation task was not set the way it should have been. Can Intel Arc hope for the same kind of improvements? IntelĪs reported by Phoronix, the change to the open-source Intel Mesa Vulkan driver was made by Lionel Landwerlin on Thursday. The importance of drivers was once again highlighted as a single line of missing code was found to drastically lower the performance of Intel GPUs.Ī new fix made to Intel graphics drivers for Linux reportedly improves the ray tracing performance by up to 100x.