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Intel Arc A770m - Current state of drivers and game support for Arc in general?

D

Dreamerbydesign

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Greetings,

I am looking at a Intel NUC locally with a Arc A770m dedicated gpu.

BUT, I remember the terrible problems at launch with Arc in general. Lack of support for older dx9 titles etc, and some current games had terrible support or did not work at all.

I do not game terrible often in fact I just sold my main gaming PC, but I could tuck this little thing behind my monitor on a mount.

I have probably 700+ games on steam from the last 15 years. Everything from old DX9/DX11 titles, indy games, to newer titles.

I don't plan to game anywhere near the level or fidelity I used to. Performance isnt so much my question...


I just want to avoid headaches and driver issues. The price is great for this unit, but if I can't plan half my games I want to, then what is the point?

Any opinions Arc owners?
 
I just grabbed a Sparkle A770 from Amazon for $289 for my HTPC. Will be running it on the test bench every night for the next week before installing it into the HTPC. I'm hoping that the driver and memory cooling issues are mostly ironed out by now as the previous OEM A770 I tried just wasn't a well designed cooling solution and the drivers were still a mess a year ago. I'll try to update to this thread as testing progresses.
 
Ok after playing with this card for the past week I have to say wow what a difference a year makes for the drivers and what a massive improvement to the cooler design from Sparkle. As far as performance goes I will now say goodbye to the htpc RX 6650XT. The Sparkle A770 outperforms it considerably in most titles and destroys it in video transcoding with only one caveat. The A770 does use quite a bit more power especially when OC'd to it's max which falls at around 2650Mhz in furmark (power limited @276 watts). During gaming the power consumption of the card peaks at around 230 watts when pushing it at max so not as bad and the cooler design easily keeps temps in check. In summary I think it's well worth the price as Intel has shown they are committed to staying the course with constant driver improvements and have ironed out most of the issues with the drivers while their work continues to prove that as they are constantly rolling out driver and firmware updates. I honestly can't wait to see what their next gen gpu's bring to the table as they certainly are proving their commitment to becoming a real player in the gpu market. Oh yea for those of you who care I did test some ray tracing here and there just for kicks and the A770 showed better performance than the 6650 as well if that matters at this performance tier.
 
I'm hoping battlemage is good enough for w 4k performance and not greedily overpriced that I can seriously consider it instead of AMD and NVIDIA
 
Yea their next iteration will need some vrm and vrm algorithm improvements with higher frequency and faster response latency to stay ahead of the core transient loading but I don't doubt that it will a considerable improvement on this generation which really is proving to be quite good for a first gen product. I have installed the A770 in my htpc and it's banging the OCP of the evga 600 watt psu so that's gonna need to be replaced now.🤣
 
I ultimately declined because the power draw was insane for its performance. Inefficient isn’t even the beginning. Decent performance for the price. But this was a Mobile soc based nook.

The brick was a 350 watt laptop power brick if that gives you any idea. And if that power supply gave up the ghost, I’d be spending probably as much to replace that.

The other thing was the noise. The mobile version of this card ran hot. And that fan sounded like a turbine when gaming. What’s the point of a nuc when it’s half the size of a small desktop, runs hotter, is louder and has a external psu that is likely extremely expensive and hard to replace.

The deal was amazing but. I passed.
 
Well this gpu has victimized another psu. The new evga 750 watt I put in there lasted about 40 minutes before it started tripping OCP. Stuck the card back on the test bench that's equipped with a 1250 watt psu and it works fine there. So apparently this thing requires a 12v rail that can support greater than 55 amps. The 1250 watt psu on my test bench is rated at 104 amps so I need something in between that's small enough to fit the case.
 
learners permit said:
Well this gpu has victimized another psu. The new evga 750 watt I put in there lasted about 40 minutes before it started tripping OCP. Stuck the card back on the test bench that's equipped with a 1250 watt psu and it works fine there. So apparently this thing requires a 12v rail that can support greater than 55 amps. The 1250 watt psu on my test bench is rated at 104 amps so I need something in between that's small enough to fit the case.
Click to expand...
Your power supply findings bring up an interesting point.
I wonder what the many reviewers had for pwer supplies in their test benches.
 
Saabjock said:
Your power supply findings bring up an interesting point.
I wonder what the many reviewers had for pwer supplies in their test benches.
Click to expand...
They're usually pretty capable units. The better the power delivery the less likely you'll have to fight with power related issues during a test, after all. Even more important when the hardware you are testing might have buggy drivers or be buggy itself.
 
Yea so turns out it wasn't the power supply at all but the evga nu sound card was conflicting or something to do with the pci-e bus. The sound card was never in the test bench with the gpu and when the gpu was transferred to the htpc that's when the trouble started. The audible click was the sound card powering off and that would hang the express bus. When I loaded the sound card on the test bench same odd behavior began. So checked evga and found a firmware update that took care of it but I left the 750 watt psu in there and it's working fine now.
 
I am running temporarily a arc 770 16gb sparkle roc card and a 5900 at 160 watt power budget on my backup Corsair sf450 till I decide on a new 750watt ish replacement. no problems at all
 
PC Power and Cooling came out with a white paper years ago, addressing the importance of higher amps on the +12 volt rail in power supplies.
They also spoke at length about modular power supplies and the effects of constantly disconnecting cables, as it relates to high resistance at the connectors.
It was quite eye opening.
As a result, I purchased one of their Crossfire 750 watt units with a massive amount of amps on that rail back in 2011.
I've now used that power supply on no less than five builds between then and now...(currently on my A770-16 LE).
The videocard has never experienced a single power-related hitch since I started using it in December of 2022.
I have to say, I am thoroughly impressed with what Intel has done with the card's drivers. It has always been extremely smooth in my gaming sessions...despite less framerate.
The only thing I currently have a niggle with, is the lack of a capture hotkey.
I still have to use OBS for video recording during gameplay because of it.
 
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