The Challenges of GPU Development: A Conversation with Gamers and Intel

As gamers, we've all encountered issues with our graphics cards at some point or another. The game studio and hardware manufacturer often have to work together to resolve these problems and ensure that gamers can enjoy their gaming experience. In this article, we'll discuss the challenges of GPU development, specifically focusing on the Intel Arc series and its latest driver updates.

Intel's Struggle with Driver Updates

The recent release of Intel's Arc series has been met with mixed reviews from gamers. While some have praised the performance of the A770 model, others have encountered issues with the drivers. The game studio and hardware manufacturer must work together to resolve these problems and ensure that gamers can enjoy their gaming experience.

The Problem with Driver Updates

The driver updates for Intel's Arc series have brought some improvements, but they're not without their challenges. For example, Halo Infinite has been plagued by issues with the driver update, particularly in terms of crashing and stability. However, it's worth noting that these issues are likely to be resolved as the drivers continue to improve.

The Importance of Collaboration

One of the key challenges of GPU development is collaboration between the game studio, hardware manufacturer, and gamers. The game studio must balance competing demands from different stakeholders, including investors, developers, and players. Intel, like other hardware manufacturers, has a significant role to play in this process.

Collaboration Between Game Studios and Hardware Manufacturers

Game studios and hardware manufacturers often have to navigate complex relationships and competing interests. For example, the AMD GPUs have had their fair share of driver issues over time, but the company has demonstrated a commitment to improving its drivers and developing open standards.

The Role of Open Standards in GPU Development

Open standards can play a significant role in improving the stability and performance of GPU drivers. The XESS initiative, for instance, is an example of how open standards can help bring better graphics capabilities to games. Intel's Arc series has also benefited from this approach, with features like ray tracing and AI-enhanced rendering.

The Challenges of GPU Development

GPU development is a complex and challenging process that requires significant resources and expertise. The hardware itself does seem pretty solid, but the software issues are often more significant. Collaboration between game studios, hardware manufacturers, and gamers is essential to resolving these issues and ensuring that gamers can enjoy their gaming experience.

The Impact of Competition on GPU Development

Competition in the market can drive innovation and improvement in GPU development. The AMD GPUs have been a major competitor to Intel's Arc series, and the two companies have had to work together to address common challenges. This competition has pushed both companies to improve their drivers and develop new technologies.

The Future of GPU Development

As the market continues to evolve, it's likely that we'll see further improvements in GPU development. The recent release of Intel's Arc series has brought some promising developments, but there's still work to be done. Gamers need affordable and high-performance GPUs, and the companies must continue to innovate and improve their products to meet these demands.

The Pros and Cons of Buying an Intel Arc GPU

For those considering purchasing an Intel Arc GPU, it's essential to weigh the pros and cons. The A770 model has impressive performance, but it may not be perfect. Some games may encounter issues with the driver update, particularly Halo Infinite. However, overall gaming experience is likely to be good for popular titles like Fortnite.

The Need for Collaboration and Communication

Collaboration and communication are essential between game studios, hardware manufacturers, and gamers. The developers' time is finite, and they must balance competing demands from different stakeholders. Intel's Arc series has demonstrated some promise, but it's crucial that the company continues to improve its drivers and develop new technologies.

Intel's Position in the Market

Intel is a significant player in the market, with a larger and more competent development staff than Nvidia and AMD combined. This doesn't mean they're better or worse; it just means they have a unique perspective on the challenges of GPU development. The company has demonstrated some promising developments, but there's still work to be done.

The Gamers' Perspective

From the gamers' perspective, the most important thing is that they get a high-quality gaming experience. They want affordable and reliable hardware that can handle demanding games. While Intel's Arc series has its challenges, it's likely to improve over time.

Conclusion

GPU development is a complex and challenging process that requires significant resources and expertise. The collaboration between game studios, hardware manufacturers, and gamers is essential to resolving these issues and ensuring that gamers can enjoy their gaming experience. As the market continues to evolve, we can expect further improvements in GPU development.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI just want a game with the best performance possible have you been introduced to the Intel Arc a770 Phantom gaming Edition from ASRock the drivers for this have been updated making this video February 2023 some big performance gains and some big performance claims by Intel but as is often the case the truth is a little murkier than that it's not quite as clear-cut to be sure Intel has posted very impressive games with their a770 this is actually a pretty good launch for Intel player 3 has entered the game XE SS arguably one of the best Technologies to come out of the Intel ramp up in the GPU space but there's actually a lot of subtlety and Nuance here let's Dive In so Intel released new drivers and a lot of people have covered the new drivers and Intel themselves have said you can expect up to a 41 performance Improvement I've got my a770 from ASRock and I've also got my ASRock Phantom gaming widescreen display here which we used for a fair bit of our testing we've also tested competing products from Nvidia and AMD it's also been some price cuts at least it seems like there's been some price Cuts can't get any official confirmation from that but both Micro Center Newegg and Amazon are reflecting some pretty steep price discounts on the a770 and the a770 is a car that should be roughly in line sort of kinda with like you know the 6700 and Nvidia is still stuck in there uh 3000 Series they haven't launched the 4000 series cards that cost around three hundred dollars four hundred dollars something like that and the least expensive a770 that I've seen has been below 300 dollars 250 is that on the table 220 I don't know but at those kind of prices yeah it looks pretty good on paper but what's the real world experience what's the breakdown well fortunately we've got our data from the last time we tested the a770 around launch well a little after launch because ASRock made some tweaks and improvements their version of the card supports some really interesting things in terms of overclocking and the board itself and so on and so forth but uh I mean just look at that card design it looks it looks sort of familiar right now I got some feeling that uh ASRock might be reusing a couple of components here with their Phantom gaming Intel arcline I mean to be sure the box is fancy and again xcss but when we look at a breakdown of gaming performance especially with older AAA titles and newer AAA titles the performance really is pretty interesting so for testing I tried to do real world playthroughs and the reason for that is because I had some unsettling things happen when I was revisiting this in terms of performance on paper the performance seemed really good but the real world experience with the GPU was sort of strange so Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 definitely had the largest performance increase it's 33 FPS higher 1080P and 25 FPS higher at 1440p the one percent and the 0.1 percent low is also increased significantly meaning that the gameplay experience is overall very smooth I wish that I'd started the play testing with 4 Borderlands 3 because that would have given me a lot more confidence for the rest of the games basically everything was working according to plan and Borderlands 3. that's really good shout out to the Tomb Raider we always kind of use that as a baseline it really didn't improve much in fact it's pretty much the same shadow of the Tomb Raider with the launch day drivers they couldn't really improve them I have a feeling that's one of the games that got the most attention because literally every Reviewer is testing shot of the Tomb Raider even though it's a four billion year old game at this point with The Arc GPU I'm not really sure that it's representative of real world average performance maybe you have to randomly choose a game in testing I don't know it's something that we have to be careful of when we're testing and reviewing cars because the performance is not necessarily consistent or the same or at least hey new drivers are launching everything is dramatically improved not so on Shadow of the Tomb Raider except the one percent and the 0.1 percent lows were much better so that's good again the 0.1 percent low is a 1440p were over twice as high with the new drivers meaning that somebody was looking at this and saying ah yes there was some stuttering here let's do this but it was kind of at odds with what I remember because when I remember playing shadow of the Tomb Raider I remember thinking uh the performance here isn't super awesome but then when I looked at the averages it was like well the average is basically the same why do I have this memory that shadow of the Tomb Raider wasn't any good and then it kind of dawned on me as we did more testing oh the reason it didn't feel like it was performing well was because the frame rate was so inconsistent and now that the frame rate is much more consistent on the newer drivers it really does feel better and that's not something that we really quantify with charts and graphs when we're presenting these cards and so that's why I wanted to do this video it's like this is a very subtle thing that you have to look for and and see if it's discussed and the Intel team should be lauded here because they've obviously done a lot of work even with shadow of the Tomb Raider and a relatively ancient game to improve things since launch day even if you look at the averages and you say oh the averages really haven't moved much The Real World gameplay experience I assure you has moved significantly since launch day similar stories from Deus Ex 21 average FPS higher 1080P and 16 higher at 1440p but the 0.1 percent lows again were almost twice as high so they fixed the General in performance and they also fix their stuttering in 0.1 percent lows which is fabulous cyberpunk 2077 saw the least Improvement overall with the exception of Halo infinite which we'll talk about in a minute it's kind of disappointing because cyberpunk 2077 I think is getting kind of a second life in post-release hate has kind of died down and they've added some more stuff and fixed a lot of bugs in the game itself so yeah okay that makes sense I think you can get by with cyberpunk 2077 at the lower quality settings you shouldn't have to do that unless this card is coming in at a significantly lower price point now Halo infinite is an interesting case study because you kind of step back and you look into the world of gpus four games and gpus to work well together the game studio and the hardware vendor pretty much have to work together you can't just follow the DirectX standard there will be the idealists among you who say no if you just Implement Vulcan or you just implement the standards or you just do this it will work perfectly but that's sort of a very naive unlearned position depending on how the game is built and what particular state of the art the game was pushing at the time that it was built it won't be the case that the game is using a perfect reference implementation of anything it won't be the case that the the game is using the driver exactly as it was in the run-up to launch a lot of the times the developers have to do Herculean things and move mountains and figure stuff out a lot of the times the reasons the game drivers are so large is you have these Engineers inside companies like Nvidia and AMD in a graphics division that look at the game figure out what the game is doing wrong and then they'll do runtime binary patch which is literally taking the game as it exists and sort of modifying how the game does stuff with the GPU driver to make it slightly different so it might do things in a different order or there might be a conditional in the driver that's you know if player is playing Halo infinite expect things to come in this order reroute them into this order in terms of how we actually do it on Hardware so they do some optimizations now they may communicate that back to the game company or that may just be something they build into the actual game Driver and looking at those drivers from kind of a Point Blank Range to understand what the drivers are doing and why the driver needs to know what specific game that you're playing not just an API this isn't just Vulcan it's not just DirectX 11 it's not just DirectX 12. but what's going on with the game then you sort of begin to understand the challenges that Intel faces and so then we look at Halo infinite Halo infinite is actually a really fun game I played all the way through the campaign and it's really super disappointing that uh AI not a Halo Aficionado can sort of see what the Halo fans are talking about when they complain about the 343 Studios and the terrible mess that Halo multiplayer is and like when you've screwed up that badly that casual Rando Halo player is saying well you guys should probably work on that um you've messed up pretty badly but also that's why Halo I think doesn't have a huge player base right now and that also means I think that it's not getting a lot of attention from companies like Intel where they look at it and they say there's something wrong with this implementation or possibly 343 Studios did something really Herculean under the hood to make Halo infinite as good as it is but that was sort of in the state of things as they were on launch day and drivers and everything else have moved on since launch day and certainly doesn't seem like anybody on the original Halo Dev team is paying attention and the individual driver companies and that sort of thing that are working on those those components AMD Intel Nvidia I don't seem to be able to fix a lot of things either it runs the best on Nvidia a Halo infinite at this point which seems kind of weird because I think it was an amb launch title wasn't it is that is that you can the engagement challenging sort of correct me on that and let me know but um it's sort of a it's sort of a strange situation when you look at it and oh boy does the Intel Arc GPU have a whole host of problems in addition to the game just randomly crashing when you actually play it uh uh there's a lot of strange visual artifacts a lot of strange things happening the birds aren't real JJ a Bruce lens effect ah don't you know Birds aren't real so Halo infinite being as much of a mess as it is I think is an Exemplar for what you can expect if the game that you're trying to play is particularly obscure not well supported maybe people aren't checking it I'm surprised that Halo infinite would be considered obscure and that people aren't checking it in this day and age but it seems obvious that it's just simply not actually being checked or tested or or something that's very odd going on with Microsoft and the game studios and maybe it's some kind of tantrum because they can't acquire Activision or something on the Microsoft side I don't I don't know but when you encounter these kind of problems the game studio and Intel are gonna have to work together to solve the issue to make it go away so the gamers can enjoy the gaming experience or or open source the game because that's also completely an option just let the community fix it get out of the way that works see also quick three and doom and other doom and then the later version of Doom and a bunch of Doom games it's software they did it right now Intel has the development Force Intel is the 800 pound gorilla in this room in Intel probably has a larger and more competent overall development staff than Nvidia and AMD combined and that's not a knock against either one there's a lot of talented people inside Nvidia and AMD working on these kinds of things it's just that Intel is so extremely been there done that that I think instead the takeaway that you should have from this is not they need to spend more resources on this but the GPU development is hard even outside the hardware the software is just as much or more important than the hardware and I'm sure that AMD users can attest to that as well because the AMD gpus have had their fair share of driver issues as well over time but as AMD has grown as a company they really seem to have done a good job being good stewards of their driver team maybe you disagree again engagement challenge but from my vantage point it sure seems like that as AMD has sold more gpus and put more work into their gpus that they have been good stewards of the developers working on those things working on Open Standards I mean Hello GPU open if it wasn't for GPU open X ESS which again is probably the best thing to come out of the Intel Arc drivers probably wouldn't have been a thing we probably wouldn't have xcess in as many games as we do right now today without AMD sort of putting pressure on Everybody by saying look at this awesome cool stuff we're doing a GPU open you can bring into any game you want that's really really cool stuff on the Intel arc side if you're willing to put up with a few warts and you sort of go into it with open eyes knowing that some games might be problematic Halo infinite in particular at the top of that list right now although people noticing and complaining about it probably going to get that fixed again engagement challenge check for recent comments Halo infinite if that's your thing but a lot of games actually did perform really well fortnite performed really well unless you exceeded the eight gigs of vram and then it crashed for mysterious reasons again that's probably just housekeeping issues inside the driver but generally for Esports titles and popular titles and GTA and not only is the overall gaming experience pretty good if you're on one of those you know let's call them popular titles but with the driver releases of the last couple of weeks month or so things for a770 users have improved dramatically so if you wanted to save 50 100 on a GPU it wouldn't be a bad choice because Intel is sort of punching above their weight class with some little things that may or may not get ironed out in the driver side of things the hardware itself does seem pretty solid and it does seem like most of these issues are down to software issues and you know just collaboration and communication is needed between the game company and Intel of course think about it from a game company perspective as well your developers are a finite resource they only have so much time who are you going to put all your time into well you're going to put all your time into whoever sells the most gpus obviously and then you have not one but two other choices so you're probably going to choose the one that is the most bang for the buck the most players the least headache to implement something like that and that means that the company that's you know sort of the lowest company on the totem pole is going to have to spend even more money and even more resources to try to make up that deficiency on their own and this is a real challenge that Intel faces I like where they're going with their gpus I like the performance of the a770 and I like what azerock has put together but understand that if you buy one of these even now you know well after launch that not everything is going to be perfect and some things are quite far from perfect but it's a deal I'm one of this level one this has been a revisit of the arc a770 and the performance that the driver updates have brought and just some of my thoughts on the GPU industry and that sort of thing again the more people making affordable gpus the lower the prices will be overall Gamers need that Gamers really really need that but will this be a hugely profitable Cash Cow for Intel in the end I don't know the jury's out on that one I'm signing out you find me the level one formsI just want a game with the best performance possible have you been introduced to the Intel Arc a770 Phantom gaming Edition from ASRock the drivers for this have been updated making this video February 2023 some big performance gains and some big performance claims by Intel but as is often the case the truth is a little murkier than that it's not quite as clear-cut to be sure Intel has posted very impressive games with their a770 this is actually a pretty good launch for Intel player 3 has entered the game XE SS arguably one of the best Technologies to come out of the Intel ramp up in the GPU space but there's actually a lot of subtlety and Nuance here let's Dive In so Intel released new drivers and a lot of people have covered the new drivers and Intel themselves have said you can expect up to a 41 performance Improvement I've got my a770 from ASRock and I've also got my ASRock Phantom gaming widescreen display here which we used for a fair bit of our testing we've also tested competing products from Nvidia and AMD it's also been some price cuts at least it seems like there's been some price Cuts can't get any official confirmation from that but both Micro Center Newegg and Amazon are reflecting some pretty steep price discounts on the a770 and the a770 is a car that should be roughly in line sort of kinda with like you know the 6700 and Nvidia is still stuck in there uh 3000 Series they haven't launched the 4000 series cards that cost around three hundred dollars four hundred dollars something like that and the least expensive a770 that I've seen has been below 300 dollars 250 is that on the table 220 I don't know but at those kind of prices yeah it looks pretty good on paper but what's the real world experience what's the breakdown well fortunately we've got our data from the last time we tested the a770 around launch well a little after launch because ASRock made some tweaks and improvements their version of the card supports some really interesting things in terms of overclocking and the board itself and so on and so forth but uh I mean just look at that card design it looks it looks sort of familiar right now I got some feeling that uh ASRock might be reusing a couple of components here with their Phantom gaming Intel arcline I mean to be sure the box is fancy and again xcss but when we look at a breakdown of gaming performance especially with older AAA titles and newer AAA titles the performance really is pretty interesting so for testing I tried to do real world playthroughs and the reason for that is because I had some unsettling things happen when I was revisiting this in terms of performance on paper the performance seemed really good but the real world experience with the GPU was sort of strange so Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 definitely had the largest performance increase it's 33 FPS higher 1080P and 25 FPS higher at 1440p the one percent and the 0.1 percent low is also increased significantly meaning that the gameplay experience is overall very smooth I wish that I'd started the play testing with 4 Borderlands 3 because that would have given me a lot more confidence for the rest of the games basically everything was working according to plan and Borderlands 3. that's really good shout out to the Tomb Raider we always kind of use that as a baseline it really didn't improve much in fact it's pretty much the same shadow of the Tomb Raider with the launch day drivers they couldn't really improve them I have a feeling that's one of the games that got the most attention because literally every Reviewer is testing shot of the Tomb Raider even though it's a four billion year old game at this point with The Arc GPU I'm not really sure that it's representative of real world average performance maybe you have to randomly choose a game in testing I don't know it's something that we have to be careful of when we're testing and reviewing cars because the performance is not necessarily consistent or the same or at least hey new drivers are launching everything is dramatically improved not so on Shadow of the Tomb Raider except the one percent and the 0.1 percent lows were much better so that's good again the 0.1 percent low is a 1440p were over twice as high with the new drivers meaning that somebody was looking at this and saying ah yes there was some stuttering here let's do this but it was kind of at odds with what I remember because when I remember playing shadow of the Tomb Raider I remember thinking uh the performance here isn't super awesome but then when I looked at the averages it was like well the average is basically the same why do I have this memory that shadow of the Tomb Raider wasn't any good and then it kind of dawned on me as we did more testing oh the reason it didn't feel like it was performing well was because the frame rate was so inconsistent and now that the frame rate is much more consistent on the newer drivers it really does feel better and that's not something that we really quantify with charts and graphs when we're presenting these cards and so that's why I wanted to do this video it's like this is a very subtle thing that you have to look for and and see if it's discussed and the Intel team should be lauded here because they've obviously done a lot of work even with shadow of the Tomb Raider and a relatively ancient game to improve things since launch day even if you look at the averages and you say oh the averages really haven't moved much The Real World gameplay experience I assure you has moved significantly since launch day similar stories from Deus Ex 21 average FPS higher 1080P and 16 higher at 1440p but the 0.1 percent lows again were almost twice as high so they fixed the General in performance and they also fix their stuttering in 0.1 percent lows which is fabulous cyberpunk 2077 saw the least Improvement overall with the exception of Halo infinite which we'll talk about in a minute it's kind of disappointing because cyberpunk 2077 I think is getting kind of a second life in post-release hate has kind of died down and they've added some more stuff and fixed a lot of bugs in the game itself so yeah okay that makes sense I think you can get by with cyberpunk 2077 at the lower quality settings you shouldn't have to do that unless this card is coming in at a significantly lower price point now Halo infinite is an interesting case study because you kind of step back and you look into the world of gpus four games and gpus to work well together the game studio and the hardware vendor pretty much have to work together you can't just follow the DirectX standard there will be the idealists among you who say no if you just Implement Vulcan or you just implement the standards or you just do this it will work perfectly but that's sort of a very naive unlearned position depending on how the game is built and what particular state of the art the game was pushing at the time that it was built it won't be the case that the game is using a perfect reference implementation of anything it won't be the case that the the game is using the driver exactly as it was in the run-up to launch a lot of the times the developers have to do Herculean things and move mountains and figure stuff out a lot of the times the reasons the game drivers are so large is you have these Engineers inside companies like Nvidia and AMD in a graphics division that look at the game figure out what the game is doing wrong and then they'll do runtime binary patch which is literally taking the game as it exists and sort of modifying how the game does stuff with the GPU driver to make it slightly different so it might do things in a different order or there might be a conditional in the driver that's you know if player is playing Halo infinite expect things to come in this order reroute them into this order in terms of how we actually do it on Hardware so they do some optimizations now they may communicate that back to the game company or that may just be something they build into the actual game Driver and looking at those drivers from kind of a Point Blank Range to understand what the drivers are doing and why the driver needs to know what specific game that you're playing not just an API this isn't just Vulcan it's not just DirectX 11 it's not just DirectX 12. but what's going on with the game then you sort of begin to understand the challenges that Intel faces and so then we look at Halo infinite Halo infinite is actually a really fun game I played all the way through the campaign and it's really super disappointing that uh AI not a Halo Aficionado can sort of see what the Halo fans are talking about when they complain about the 343 Studios and the terrible mess that Halo multiplayer is and like when you've screwed up that badly that casual Rando Halo player is saying well you guys should probably work on that um you've messed up pretty badly but also that's why Halo I think doesn't have a huge player base right now and that also means I think that it's not getting a lot of attention from companies like Intel where they look at it and they say there's something wrong with this implementation or possibly 343 Studios did something really Herculean under the hood to make Halo infinite as good as it is but that was sort of in the state of things as they were on launch day and drivers and everything else have moved on since launch day and certainly doesn't seem like anybody on the original Halo Dev team is paying attention and the individual driver companies and that sort of thing that are working on those those components AMD Intel Nvidia I don't seem to be able to fix a lot of things either it runs the best on Nvidia a Halo infinite at this point which seems kind of weird because I think it was an amb launch title wasn't it is that is that you can the engagement challenging sort of correct me on that and let me know but um it's sort of a it's sort of a strange situation when you look at it and oh boy does the Intel Arc GPU have a whole host of problems in addition to the game just randomly crashing when you actually play it uh uh there's a lot of strange visual artifacts a lot of strange things happening the birds aren't real JJ a Bruce lens effect ah don't you know Birds aren't real so Halo infinite being as much of a mess as it is I think is an Exemplar for what you can expect if the game that you're trying to play is particularly obscure not well supported maybe people aren't checking it I'm surprised that Halo infinite would be considered obscure and that people aren't checking it in this day and age but it seems obvious that it's just simply not actually being checked or tested or or something that's very odd going on with Microsoft and the game studios and maybe it's some kind of tantrum because they can't acquire Activision or something on the Microsoft side I don't I don't know but when you encounter these kind of problems the game studio and Intel are gonna have to work together to solve the issue to make it go away so the gamers can enjoy the gaming experience or or open source the game because that's also completely an option just let the community fix it get out of the way that works see also quick three and doom and other doom and then the later version of Doom and a bunch of Doom games it's software they did it right now Intel has the development Force Intel is the 800 pound gorilla in this room in Intel probably has a larger and more competent overall development staff than Nvidia and AMD combined and that's not a knock against either one there's a lot of talented people inside Nvidia and AMD working on these kinds of things it's just that Intel is so extremely been there done that that I think instead the takeaway that you should have from this is not they need to spend more resources on this but the GPU development is hard even outside the hardware the software is just as much or more important than the hardware and I'm sure that AMD users can attest to that as well because the AMD gpus have had their fair share of driver issues as well over time but as AMD has grown as a company they really seem to have done a good job being good stewards of their driver team maybe you disagree again engagement challenge but from my vantage point it sure seems like that as AMD has sold more gpus and put more work into their gpus that they have been good stewards of the developers working on those things working on Open Standards I mean Hello GPU open if it wasn't for GPU open X ESS which again is probably the best thing to come out of the Intel Arc drivers probably wouldn't have been a thing we probably wouldn't have xcess in as many games as we do right now today without AMD sort of putting pressure on Everybody by saying look at this awesome cool stuff we're doing a GPU open you can bring into any game you want that's really really cool stuff on the Intel arc side if you're willing to put up with a few warts and you sort of go into it with open eyes knowing that some games might be problematic Halo infinite in particular at the top of that list right now although people noticing and complaining about it probably going to get that fixed again engagement challenge check for recent comments Halo infinite if that's your thing but a lot of games actually did perform really well fortnite performed really well unless you exceeded the eight gigs of vram and then it crashed for mysterious reasons again that's probably just housekeeping issues inside the driver but generally for Esports titles and popular titles and GTA and not only is the overall gaming experience pretty good if you're on one of those you know let's call them popular titles but with the driver releases of the last couple of weeks month or so things for a770 users have improved dramatically so if you wanted to save 50 100 on a GPU it wouldn't be a bad choice because Intel is sort of punching above their weight class with some little things that may or may not get ironed out in the driver side of things the hardware itself does seem pretty solid and it does seem like most of these issues are down to software issues and you know just collaboration and communication is needed between the game company and Intel of course think about it from a game company perspective as well your developers are a finite resource they only have so much time who are you going to put all your time into well you're going to put all your time into whoever sells the most gpus obviously and then you have not one but two other choices so you're probably going to choose the one that is the most bang for the buck the most players the least headache to implement something like that and that means that the company that's you know sort of the lowest company on the totem pole is going to have to spend even more money and even more resources to try to make up that deficiency on their own and this is a real challenge that Intel faces I like where they're going with their gpus I like the performance of the a770 and I like what azerock has put together but understand that if you buy one of these even now you know well after launch that not everything is going to be perfect and some things are quite far from perfect but it's a deal I'm one of this level one this has been a revisit of the arc a770 and the performance that the driver updates have brought and just some of my thoughts on the GPU industry and that sort of thing again the more people making affordable gpus the lower the prices will be overall Gamers need that Gamers really really need that but will this be a hugely profitable Cash Cow for Intel in the end I don't know the jury's out on that one I'm signing out you find me the level one forms\n"