Intel has finally addressed the ongoing performance issues with their Arc GPUs, particularly when these are used with older CPUs. They’re now investigating these problems to hopefully find solutions for them.
Intel’s Response to Arc GPU Performance Issues with Older Processors
When Intel introduced the Arc B580 and B570 GPUs, they seemed promising. They even boasted more VRAM than some of their competitors. However, they didn’t make a significant impact, in part because of subpar performance optimizations.
The problem isn’t solely with Intel’s GPU drivers. There’s been a persistent issue with the Arc Battlemage GPUs lagging behind competitors when paired with older processors, like the Ryzen 2000 series and Intel’s 9th generation Core processors. Hardware Unboxed was one of the pioneers in highlighting the lackluster performance of the Arc B580 under these circumstances.
For a long time, Intel hadn’t addressed or even acknowledged the issue. But now, they’ve finally taken to the forums to provide a response. Here’s what they had to say:
“Thank you for your patience. We are aware of reports of performance sensitivity in some games when paired with older generation processors. We have increased our platform coverage to include more configurations in our validation process, and we are continuing to investigate optimizations.”
From Intel’s statement, it seems they were aware of these issues but didn’t dedicate the necessary resources to optimize the performance. Now, they plan to broaden their optimizations to cover more configurations. This means we might see this problem resolved soon, but Intel hasn’t given specific timelines for when these updates will be rolled out.
The hardware for Intel’s current GPUs stacks up well against its competitors from the previous generation, at least when using the latest titles. However, it’s perplexing to see how they underperform when paired with Intel’s own older CPUs. No performance throttling was noted with the Arc B580 and B570 when used with the latest CPUs from Intel and AMD, so this old-gen underperformance stands out.
With these new patches, there’s hope that Intel can better compete against AMD and NVIDIA. That said, just patching these performance issues doesn’t guarantee Intel will gain ground in the GPU market. The Arc Battlemage GPUs are still hard to find, and their scarcity has essentially nudged Intel out of the current budget GPU competition.
News Source: Intel
