Arc (“Alchemist”): Intel Feedback on Driver, DirectX, and Resizable BAR

In an open Q&A session, Intel spoke on its gaming blog with Lisa Pearce, vice president and general manager of Visual Compute Group, about the current state of play for highly criticized first-generation Xe HPG-based Arc graphics cards. (“Alchemist”) and its controllers and features.

Intel talks a lot and says few news

Under the title “engineering arch“Lisa Pearce answered the first, sometimes critical, questions about the manufacturer’s first generation of Arc graphics cards. Among other things, the manager commented on the sometimes serious performance differences in games under DirectX 9, 11 and 12, as well like the free Vulkan graphics API, which the editors also attest to with Intel Arc A380 (test), and the complex issues with the partially still largely unfinished graphics driver and the PCIe Resizable BAR extension.

• Why does Intel Arc GPU performance vary between DX11 and DX12 titles?
• What is Resizing BAR and why is it important for Intel Arc GPUs?
• I have read reports that the Intel driver is not ready yet. How is the state?
• Do Intel Arc GPUs support VRR display technologies?

However, in some cases, the manager also referred to older statements Tom Petersen and Ryan Shrout made during the question-and-answer session.How to think about Intel Arc graphics with DirectX 12, Vulkan and older APIs?“had met.

The point is that DX11 and earlier APIs require both Microsoft and Intel software to have many abstractions that simplify game development. That makes sense.

For DX9, Intel uses a DX9on12 mapping layer that converts graphics commands from DX9 to DX12. We perform extensive compatibility and performance testing and work closely with Microsoft and ISVs to continually optimize this solution.

We hope to close the gap to DX11 performance over time, which will be an advantage when future drivers are introduced.

Lisa Pearce, Vice President and General Manager of Visual Compute Group

Resizable BAR should be active by default

Intel considers the resizable bar, which has brought gamers back into focus over the past year due to AMD’s Smart Access Memory (test), as essential to the performance of its graphics cards and recommends that gamers and their partners enable the PCIe function by default.

Intel Arc GPUs are optimized to work with larger memory transactions, so enabling ReBAR is essential for maximum performance in Arc.

We recommend our motherboard partners to enable ReBAR by default and expect future chipsets to continue to support this feature.

Lisa Pearce, Vice President and General Manager of Visual Compute Group

For more information on how to enable the resizable bar, the Intel manager referred to the Intel Arc Quick Start Guide.

Graphics driver should improve over time

Lisa Pearce goes on to explain that the release of Alchemist and in particular the graphics driver “bumpy‘, but Intel, for example, ‘4 of 43 problems“, Those of player nexus they were reported to have been resolved by the end of July. There are also a total of 21 user interface issues that have been fixed since then.

We continue to learn what we must do to be successful. Some of the issues were related to our installer and the way it downloads the individual components after the initial installation.

This allows us to have a smaller initial download so users can get up and running faster. However, unexpected bugs make this process unreliable, and later this year we’ll move to a combo package that downloads and installs in one step.

Lisa Pearce, Vice President and General Manager of Visual Compute Group

Finally, Pearce confirmed AMD FreeSync support, basic G-Sync support, and Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support.

Many of these points were also covered in detail by Tom Petersen and Ryan Shrout at the Intel Arc Graphics A&A.