Intel engineers discovered 43 driver points after watching one Arc A380 evaluation on YouTube

Recap: Intel launched the Arc 3 A380 in China earlier this 12 months and it lastly discovered its approach into the arms of reviewers final month. The consensus was that it carried out okay for an entry-level card however was too hindered by buggy drivers to be a product value shopping for.

Avid gamers Nexus took the time to make a video about simply the driving force issues (see above). In abstract, the sport drivers are sort-of alright: most newish video games load and play positive. However the driver installer is so problematic that it borders on being malware, and when the Arc Command app decides to not crash, its settings toggles and overclocking utilities barely work in any respect.

Partly in response, the VP and common supervisor of the Visible Computing Group at Intel, Lisa Pearce, penned a weblog put up discussing some frequent issues concerning the Arc sequence final week. She talks first concerning the minor issues with DX11 and DX9 after which reiterates the significance of enabling Resizable Bar on Arc GPUs earlier than addressing the elephant within the room.

Intel’s query: I’ve learn critiques that say Intel’s driver just isn’t prepared but. What is the standing?

“We respect the suggestions we’re getting in early critiques of our Arc software program stack. And it has been bumpy. We have now acquired frank suggestions from press throughout current critiques, and we’ve taken it to coronary heart.”

Pearce continues, however I would prefer to pause right here to reiterate that the A380 hasn’t launched exterior of China but.

Not one of the critiques, together with our personal, have been performed by means of any kind of evaluation program. As an alternative, reviewers have needed to buy their A380 samples from China and have them shipped.

“For instance, we filed 43 points with our engineering workforce from a evaluation of the A380 by Avid gamers Nexus. We had corrected 4 of these points by the tip of July. Since then, we corrected 21 UI points in our driver launch on August 19, and it additionally contains Day 0 help for Saints Row, Madden NFL 23, fixes for Stray and Horizon Zero Daybreak crashes, Marvel’s Spider-Man efficiency repair, and fixes on SmoothSync corruptions. We’re taking related approaches with experiences from different press critiques.

We’re persevering with to be taught what it should take for us to achieve success. A number of the points have been associated to our installer and the way it downloaded distinctive parts after preliminary set up. This permits us to have a smaller preliminary obtain to get customers began faster. However sudden failures are inflicting that course of to be unreliable, and later this 12 months we might be shifting to a mixed bundle that’s downloaded and put in suddenly. No extra installer points.”

It seems like Intel is listening to reviewers and reflecting on their suggestions, which is a pleasing change. Nevertheless, I discover it onerous to imagine that Intel wasn’t already conscious of a lot of the points identified by Avid gamers Nexus. They have been just too obtrusive and in the event that they have been as trivial to repair as Pearce claims, then they need to have been fastened earlier than the software program left beta. No less than a few of them are fastened now…