Intel knew at the time of the release that the biggest problem with the current Arc graphics card is not in the hardware specifications, in fact, the GPU size of the Arc A770 is not small, but the problem of drivers has been bothering them, since the release of the first discrete graphics card in October last year, Intel's graphics team has been committed to product optimization, the latest release of the driver has been a great improvement from the release of the driver.
Arc Alchemist architecture is optimized for DX12 and Vulkan API, at the beginning their driver used DX9 on11/DX9 on12 architecture, which led to the inefficiency of Arc graphics cards running DX9 games at that time, and now the new driver redesigned the architecture, after adopting the new architecture, it has achieved a very significant improvement in performance, at 1080p or 2K resolution. The DX9 gaming performance of Arc graphics cards has improved by an average of 43%, which is a very large increase.
In addition, starting February 1, the global price of the Intel Arc A750 Limited Edition graphics card will be adjusted from $289 to $249, which makes the Arc A750 more cost-effective.
Although DX9 is an older API, there are still many games that use this API, taking CS:GO as an example, more than 1 million people play every day, and there are more than 6500 games per year, so Intel is also more attentive to the optimization of DX9 games. With the latest drivers, CS:GO can run CS:GO at 347 fps on the A750 at 1080p, providing a smoother gaming experience.
Compared with the first driver, the performance of Guild Wars 2 is improved by about 10% under the new driver, while the performance of the games CS:GO, The Elder Scrolls, and "Stars" has been increased by more than 75%, and the new driver has greatly improved the performance of the graphics card.
From the frame generation time of CS:GO, it can be seen that the efficiency of the old and new drivers is obviously different
At 99% frame rate, CS:GO's smoothness has more than tripled, and other games have also improved quite a bit
It also brings a lot of performance improvements at 2K resolution, with Rift improving by 16%, Stars by 87%, CS:GO by 74% compared to the original driver, and some games with higher performance improvements than 1080p at 2K resolution.
According to Intel's official statistics, for all DX9 games, the latest driver has increased the average frame rate by 43% compared to the original driver, and the 99% frame rate has increased by 60%, and players can get a faster and smoother game experience.
In addition, the performance improvement is not limited to DX9 games, but also includes DX11 and DX12. In the case of DX11's Starframe for example, the performance of the graphics card was 159fps when it was first released, and it reached 250fps under the new driver version 4086.
For Intel, this new driver fulfills the promise they made at the beginning of the product launch. At that time, they mentioned that this graphics card still has room for improvement and can greatly improve its performance, please continue to expect Arc graphics cards to achieve better results in DX9, DX11 and DX12, and Intel will continue to fulfill the promise made at the product launch.