It seems that the company has focused only on the development of its arc graphics cardsleaving aside other aspects. Intel hasn’t released drivers for its graphics in nearly a month, and it looks like they’ll be a while to arrive. It has been pointed out that new controllers will be released at the end of April, but the reality is quite different.
Intel has a serious problem with the drivers for Arc graphics
On March 30, it promised to launch a new branch of drivers for its Arc and Iris graphics. Currently the last drivers for Arc and Iris They bear the number 1330 and date from April 8. The main driver branch is at version 1660 and there is a beta version numbered 1934.
Note that Intel has not provided any information on this subject. The logical thing would be a unification of controllers, but that’s something we don’t know. It is possible that for the moment the two branches will continue and in a few months, the one that is now the main one, will end up being left aside in favor of the one intended for Arc and Iris graphics.
As promised, new drivers with important additions should be released by the end of April. Among these should be options to disable benchmark-specific optimizations. It looks like Intel has included a system that under the 3DMark reference provides 15% more performance.
This result is a distortion of the actual data, therefore UL (3DMark developers) invalidates the results. It seems that the policies established for this software are violated. New drivers should fix this and allow you to pass the tests correctly and get a valid score. But these drivers are not yet available.
A disaster launching Arc graphics
The company, when announcing its new laptop graphics, announced the arc launch 3. This means that from the announcement they would be available on the market, while the rest of the solutions would arrive in the summer. But the reality is quite different, since laptops with Arc 3 graphics are only available in South Korea.
In addition, there is the problem of the drivers, which is quite serious. It seems that the drivers are quite unstable, especially in games. The experience of users who have a laptop with these graphics highlights random game crashes, flickering, artifacts, and other issues.
A set of problems that show that Intel has focused a lot on hardware and little on software. Note that the company has little experience in this area, since until now it only had rather weak integrated graphics. AMD and NVIDIA have many years of experience in this regard and often release drivers that work well.
It is true that AMD and NVIDIA include a list of fixed and known issues. There are no perfect pilots, it’s obvious, but there is a long way to go between specific and specific problems and mass problems.
