Rootax
Veteran
Two to three years of driver hell should be expected, in my opinion.
Why ? I mean, granted it's a new uarch, but they produce drivers for igp for a while now. It's not like it's suddenly new to them.
Two to three years of driver hell should be expected, in my opinion.
In my opinion the problem is going to be variability at the supposed performance level. No one really cares if an IGP in a particular game is terrible, so Intel's IGP track-record is mostly an unknown. Intel can get away with poor performance in IGP because the PC enthusiast crowd (forums, "journalists") doesn't really care.Why ? I mean, granted it's a new uarch, but they produce drivers for igp for a while now. It's not like it's suddenly new to them.
Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for Linux systems now has experimental support for mesh shaders that work with their forthcoming Intel Arc DG2/Alchemist graphics cards.
Hey now, Vega 64 does trade blows with 1080. It's just that it was kinda sad that it wasn't up with 1080 Ti.Can we all remember how Raja was saying the Vega would beat the 1080? I love Raja and he's a great guy to hang with, but let's temper our expectations a little.
If he's saying 3070 I'm guessing it might beat a 3050.
I'm sure every IHV shader compiler is already capable of eliminating code that doesn't contribute to any output, that's a basic optimisation. So if you disable all the other outputs (just as if you commented them out in the source) the compiler will do the right thing, no further complexity required.That's going to be one complex shader compiler to create position only shaders from the normal ones.
I am shocked, SHOCKED I say!
Just speculation but a possibility could be that Intel will focus more on OEM and system integrator sales via in house boards rather than retail DIY with AiB partners.
That might be a tougher sale than selling direct to consumers.
OEMs don't need graphics cards for most PC buyers, integrated graphics are good enough. That means for the majority of Intel based systems there's no need for a discrete graphics card leaving only AMD requiring a discrete graphics card for many of their systems. However, with AMD increasing the presence of APUs with integrated graphics, discrete is also being made less relevant for the basic PC buyers (corporate or casual consumers) of AMD systems.
Intel announced that they will totally produce 4 million Alchemist GPUs in 2022 (OEM laptops + AIBs). Even with a conservative 50/50 split (which I believe will be more like 70 laptop / 30 AIB, but let's assume 50/50 for easy calculation), it's only 2 millions cards in the DIY market. Last year, according to JPA, AIBs sold 40 millions cards. Thus 2 millions units is 5% market share. Nothing to see here folk, it's nearly rounding error...Also I think you might underestimate how many GPUs get to market with OEM and system integrator sales vs. DIY retail. I'm not referring to "basic desktop" sales. I've discussed this issue before with respect to why a lot of gamers are actually still able to get GPUs despite the mining induced retail situation. The online enthusiast community is heavily slanted (almost all) towards DIY retail which skews impressions of the overall market. Nvidia for instance was taking flak in these discussion circles for their CES presentation but there's a reason why it typically has more to do with mobile/notebooks and not retail focused on say the desktop cards..