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Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

arstechnica.com

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Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#121

Post by deadmutex »

mey wrote: post #61
pier25 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There are plenty of people that just want to upgrade an old GPU and anything modern would be a massive improvement. I'm still rocking a 1070 for 1080p/60 gaming and would love to jump to 4K/60 gaming but just can't convince myself to buy a new GPU at current prices.

I refuse to engage with the current GPU pricing insanity, so my 5900x is currently paired with a 960 GTX. When Intel enters the market it will be another factor in driving pricing back down, so might play Cyberpunk in 2022...

If you really want to play Cyberpunk on PC, and don't want to buy a new GPU.. playing it on Stadia is an option (especially if you have a GPU that can support VP9 decoding). I played it at 4K/1080p, and it looked pretty good. However, I think if you want the best graphics fidelity (i.e. 4K RayTracing), then you probably do want to just get a high end video card.

Disclosure: Work at Google, but not on Stadia.

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#122

Post by rektide »

rektide wrote: post #33
byefruit wrote: post #9

I really hope this breaks Nvidia's stranglehold on deep learning. Some competition would hopefully bring down prices at the compute high-end. AMD don't seem to even be trying on the software-side at the moment. ROCm is a mess.

ROCm seems to be tolerably decent, if you are willing to spend a couple hours, and, big if, if HIP supports all the various libraries you were relying on. CUDA has a huge support library, and ROCm has been missing not just the small fry stuff but a lot of the core stuff in the that library. Long term, AI (& a lot of other interests) need to serve themselves. CUDA is excellently convenient, but long term I have a hard…

Lot of downvotes. Anyone have any opinion? Is CUDA fine forever? Is there something other than Vulkan we should also try? Do you think AMD should solve every problem CUDA solves for their customers too? What gives here?

I see a lot a lot a lot of resistance to the idea that we should start trying to align to Vulkan. Here & elsewhere. I don't get it, it makes no sense, & everyone else using GPU's is running fast as they can towards Vulkan. Is it just too soon too early in the adoption curve, or do ya'll think there are more serious obstructions long term to building a more Vulkan centric AI/ML toolkit? It still feels inevitable to me. What we are doing now feels like a waste of time. I wish ya'll wouldn't downvote so casually, wouldn't just try to brush this viewpoint away.

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#123

Post by modeless »

jogu wrote: post #46
jeswin wrote: post #15

If Intel provides as much Linux driver support as they do for their current integrated graphics lineup, we might have a new favourite among Linux users.

Came here to say this. This will be especially interesting if there's better support for GPU virtualization to allow a Windows VM to leverage the card without passing the entire card through.

This would be worth buying one for. It's super lame that foundational features like virtualization are used as leverage for price discrimination by Nvidia, and hopefully new competition can shake things up.

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#124

Post by judge2020 »

Yizahi wrote: post #83
judge2020 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*AMD/Apple is using. Nvidia's always-sold-out Ampere-based gaming chips are made in a Samsung fab. https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-ampere-samsung-8nm-process/

Nvidia would also use TSMC 7nm since it is much better that Samsung 8mn. So potentially they are also waiting for the TSMC availability.

How is it 'much better'? 7nm is not better than 8nm because it has a smaller number - the number doesn't correlate strongly with transistor density these days.

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#125

Post by wtallis »

deaddodo wrote: post #75
voidfunc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel has the manufacturing capability to really beat up Nvidia. Even if the cards don’t perform like top-tier cards they could still win bigly here. Very exciting!

Where do you get that idea? The third-party fabs have far greater production capacity[1]. Intel isn't even in the top five. They're a shared resource; however, if you're willing to pay the money, you could monopolize their resources and outproduce anybody. 1 - https://epsnews.com/2021/02/10/5-fabs-own-54-of-global-semic...

You're looking at the wrong numbers. The wafer capacity of memory fabs and logic fabs that are only equipped for older nodes aren't relevant to the GPU market. So Micron, SK hynix, Kioxia/WD and a good chunk of Samsung and TSMC capacity are irrelevant here.

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#126

Post by dleslie »

acdha wrote: post #85
dleslie wrote: post #60

The sub-heading is false, I had a dedicated Intel GPU in 1998 by way of the i740.

Was that billed as a serious gaming GPU? I don't remember the i740 as anything other than a low-budget option.

It was sold as a serious gaming GPU.

Recall that this was an era where GPUs weren't yet a thing; instead there was 2D video cards and 3D accelerators that paired with. The i740 and TNT paved the way toward GPUs, while I don't recall whether either had programmable pipelines they both had 2D capacity. For budget gamers, it wasn't a _terrible_ choice to purchase an i740 for the combined 2D/3D ability.

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#127

Post by ayngg »

davidjytang wrote: post #69
ayngg wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought they are using TSMC for their gpu, which means they will be part of the same bottleneck that is affecting everyone else.

I believe nvidia doesn't use TSMC or not only use TSMC.

Yeah they use Samsung for their current series but are planning to move to TSMC for the next irrc.

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#128

Post by 015a »

pjmlp wrote: post #106
015a wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup; three other points I'd add: 1) I hate to say "year of desktop Linux" like every year, but with the Steam Deck release later this year, and Valve's commitment to continue investing and collaborating on Proton to ensure wide-range game support; Linux gaming is going to grow substantially throughout 2022, if only due to the new devices added by Steam Decks. Intel has always had fantastic Linux video driver support.…

Steam will hardly change the 1% status of GNU/Linux desktop. Many forget that most studios don't bother to port their Android games to GNU/Linux, which are mostly written using the NDK, so plain ISO C and C++, GL, Vulkan, OpenSL,..., yet no GNU/Linux, because the market just isn't there.

The first wave of Steam Decks sold out in minutes. They're now pushing back delivery to Q2 2022. The demand for the device is pretty significant; not New Console large, but its definitely big enough to be visible in the Steam Hardware Survey upon release later this year, despite the vast size of Steam's overall playerbase.

Two weeks ago, the Hardware Survey reported Linux breaching 1% for the first time ever [1], for reasons not related to Deck (in fact, its not obvious WHY linux has been growing; disappointment in the Win11 announcement may have caused it, but in short, its healthy, natural, long-term growth). I would put real money up that Linux will hit 2% by the January 2022 survey, and 5% by January 2023.

Proton short-circuits the porting argument. It works fantastically for most games, with zero effort from the devs.

We're not talking about Linux being the majority. But its definitely looking like it will see growth over the next decade.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/steam-survey-linux-1-perce...

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#129

Post by orra »

NonContro wrote: post #120
Exmoor wrote: post #11

As TFA rightly points out, unless something drastically changes in the next ~6mo, Intel is going to launch into the most favorable market situation we've seen in our lifetimes. Previously, the expectation is that they needed to introduce something that was competitive with the top end cards from nVidia and AMD. With basically all GPU's out of stock currently they really just need to introduce something competitive wi…

How long will that situation last though, with Ethereum 2.0 around the corner and the next difficulty bomb scheduled for December? https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/olla5w/eip_3554_o... Intel could be launching their cards into a GPU surplus... That's discrete GPUs though, presumably the major volumes are in laptop GPUs? Will Intel have a CPU+GPU combo product for laptops?

Alas: Bitcoin.

Re: Intel’s Arc GPUs will compete with GeForce and Radeon in early 2022

#130

Post by dragontamer »

blagie wrote: post #119
dragontamer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, I could figure it out, but I want plug-and-play, stability, and backwards-compatibility Its right there in the ROCm introduction. https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm#Hardware-and-Softw... > ROCm officially supports AMD GPUs that use following chips: > GFX9 GPUs > "Vega 10" chips, such as on the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 and Radeon Instinct MI25 > "Vega 7nm" chips, such as on the Radeon Instinct MI50, Radeon…

Only... (1) There are a million different ROCm pages and introductions (2) Even that page is out-of-date, and e.g. claims unofficial support for "GFX8 GPUs: Polaris 11 chips, such as on the AMD Radeon RX 570 and Radeon Pro WX 4100," although those were randomly disabled after ROCm 3.5.1. ... if you have a Ph.D in AMD productology, you might be able to figure it out. If it's merely in computer science, math, or engine…

> Half-decent engineer time is worth $350/hour, all in (benefits, overhead, etc.). Once you've spent a week futzing with AMD's mess, you're behind by the cost of ten NVidia A4000 cards which Just Work.

It seems pretty simple to me if we're talking about compute. The MI-cards are AMD's line of compute GPUs. Buy an MI-card if you want to use ROCm with full support. That's MI25, MI50, or MI100.

> As a footnote, I suspect in the long term, small purchases will be worth more than the supercomputing megacontracts. GPGPU is wildly underutilized right now. That's mostly a gap of software, standards, and support. If we can get that right, every computer have many teraflops of computing power, even for stupid video chat filters and whatnot.

I think you're right, but the #1 use of these devices is running video games (aka: DirectX and Vulkan). Compute capabilities are quite secondary at the moment.

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