Intel ARC GPUs, Xe Architecture for dGPUs [2022-]

I've been saying this for years.
as @swaaye has commented already, not it's easier than ever. On my PC I have a Windows 11 2TB partition on a NVMe just for gaming, and another 1TB SSD W11 partition for general and typical OS usage.

Tweaking the gaming partition is simpler -a debloat utility and HDR calibration with that Microsoft tool...-, drivers and you are done.

Still, Tom Petersen from Intel mentioned in a DF interview that their idea is that drivers take care of everything and tell the player things like "your game is CPU limited", and adjust the settings automatically to that. I'd be certainly grateful, I like to tweak and open systems, but sometimes it can become tiresome. My future PC in 3-4 years is going to be an Intel -or Dell (Intel based) or similar- NUC, that I am sure of.
 
as @swaaye has commented already, not it's easier than ever. On my PC I have a Windows 11 2TB partition on a NVMe just for gaming, and another 1TB SSD W11 partition for general and typical OS usage.

Tweaking the gaming partition is simpler -a debloat utility and HDR calibration with that Microsoft tool...-, drivers and you are done.

Still, Tom Petersen from Intel mentioned in a DF interview that their idea is that drivers take care of everything and tell the player things like "your game is CPU limited", and adjust the settings automatically to that. I'd be certainly grateful, I like to tweak and open systems, but sometimes it can become tiresome and you end up happy with anything.

It was much easier back then.....and back then games released actually worked on day one.
 
Yeah it was much easier back before PnP and Win95. Jumpers were the shit. Loved serial, parallel and drifting analog gameports too instead of USB. And man when you often needed different config.sys and autoexec.bat profiles to configure DOS memory and drivers for each game. I used to write these up from scratch on the lunchroom table for people. If you needed a patch or a driver update you had to get on a BBS, pay per hour ISP, or get it snail mail from the developer. And eventually AMD brought forth Super7 in their bid to stop being an Intel parasite, and like zero of those boards have a fully compliant AGP slot. Maybe your motherboard's capacitors were all defective anyway and started leaking a year or two in. Don't trust those VIA USB ports either. Or your southbridge was bugged and would corrupt data with disk transfers depending on your PCI cards. Maybe your new UDMA66 hard disk is incompatible with uhh UDMA66, and your Highpoint controller certainly is anyway. And your new Win9x, while better than that absolutely ridiculous Win3.x, is going to frequently crash and burn because 3rd party VXD drivers, and it has no memory protection anyway so something is going to bring the thing down regardless of how careful you are. And good old DLL hell! Also loved when every 3D accelerator had its own API because they weren't powerful enough for OpenGL, D3D was embarassing, and they wanted to lock you in anyway!

:)
 
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Yeah it was much easier back before PnP and Win95. Jumpers were the shit. Loved serial, parallel and drifting analog gameports too instead of USB. And man when you often needed different config.sys and autoexec.bat profiles to configure DOS memory and drivers for each game. I used to write these up from scratch on the lunchroom table for people. If you needed a patch or a driver update you had to get on a BBS, pay per hour ISP, or get it snail mail from the developer. And eventually AMD brought forth Super7 in their bid to stop being an Intel parasite, and like zero of those boards have a fully compliant AGP slot. Maybe your motherboard's capacitors were all defective anyway and started leaking a year or two in. Don't trust those VIA USB ports either. Or your southbridge was bugged and would corrupt data with disk transfers depending on your PCI cards. Maybe your new UDMA66 hard disk is incompatible with uhh UDMA66, and your Highpoint controller certainly is anyway. And your new Win9x, while better than that absolutely ridiculous Win3.x, is going to frequently crash and burn because 3rd party VXD drivers, and it has no memory protection anyway so something is going to bring the thing down regardless of how careful you are. And good old DLL hell! Also loved when every 3D accelerator had its own API because they weren't powerful enough for OpenGL, D3D was embarassing, and they wanted to lock you in anyway!

:)

You're talking much, much further back then I am.

PC has been pretty much a doddle to do since Windows XP in 2001.
 
You're talking much, much further back then I am.

PC has been pretty much a doddle to do since Windows XP in 2001.
Yeah I said as much before. But it was in response to you agreeing with the Intel guy about it being hard now. I'm thinking the real meaning there is he just wants backward compatibility to not be a thing because it is always a problem for his GPUs.
 
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Yeah I said as much before. But it was in response to you agreeing with the Intel guy about it being hard now. I'm thinking the real meaning there is he just wants backward compatibility to not be a thing because it is always a problem for his GPUs.

It is much harder now........

So many CPU generations, multiple memory types, multiple chipset types, K sku's and none k sku's........ RT GPU's and none RT GPU's.

Different NVME speeds, different PCIEX versions.....different USB3 versions.....

It's so much more complex now for someone new to PC because there's 10x more choice now and way more standards and features to research then there was back in the Windows XP days.
 
It is so hard now so many things!
Celeron, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium 4 (Northwood or Prescott?!), Slot1, Slot 2, Socket 370, Socket 423, Socket 478, LGA 775, K6-III, K6-III+, K6-2+, Athlon, Athlon 4, Athlon MP, Athlon XP, Athlon 64, Duron, so many cores!, Cyrix III, VIA C5/C7, Transmeta, KT133, KT133A, KM133, KT266, KM266, KT266A, KT333, KT400, KT400A, K8T800, K8T890, K8M800 (etc!), nForce 220/420, nForce 2/400/Ultra 400, nForce 3 150/250/Ultra, nForce 4/Ultra/SLI, AMD 750/760, ATI wants to do chipsets too!!, SIS 630, 635, 645, 7xx, Intel 815, 815E, 820, 830, 845, 845E, 845G, 865, 865G, 875, SATA, PATA, SCSI, SAS, DDR, SDR, PC2100, PC2400(huh?), PC2700, PC3200, PC100, PC133, RDRAM RIMMs!, PC700, PC800, RAM chip density and chipset compatibility, USB 1/2, Firewire 400/800, EAX 2/3/4/5, OpenAL, AGP 2x/4x/8x, AGP slot compatibility, my favs games might need Glide or S3 Metal!, do I need the T&L and pixel shaders?!, PCIe, PCI, ACR, CMR, AMR, WinMe, Win2K, WinXP... :p
 
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AGP 2x/4x/8x, AGP slot compatibility

You forget that there were still PCI graphics cards and VESA Local Bus graphics cards, while not state of the art when WinXP came out there were still quite a few PCs with graphics cards in those slots. :p

Hell I still took support calls for WinXP and Win2k users with MB's that had memory chip sockets on the MB. Hand me down PCs that they were using for gaming. :)

In terms of hardware support issues for PCs used for gaming, Windows XP was by far the worse. It didn't help that NV support for XP was atrocious at first. So many support calls for Windows XP when it launched was due to NForce motherboards or NV GPU drivers causing the OS to BSOD or just crash to a black screen. Hardware tech was advancing so fast that CPUs and GPUs would be outdated and too slow for the latest games within 3-4 years of their release ... and here I am still gaming on 1070 just fine.

In contrast, modern gaming has it easy compared to WinXP days. Granted as it neared the EOL for support, WinXP was in a pretty solid place for gaming, but it was rather bad for the first few years depending on what hardware you had in your PC.

Cost on the other hand is a whole other issue. That's the biggest problem facing PC gaming now.

Regards,
SB
 
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Cost is fine unless you're aiming to have top of the line parts only which is often unnecessary. By going with lower end of the spectrum you will be forced to upgrade more often but this - this is exactly how it was back in the days of AGP and all.

It can also be more preferable as things like platform and CPUs are evolving fast right now meaning that you're probably missing on new features by staying on a top end system longer instead of going with a (relatively) lower end one but upgrading it more often.
 
Celeron, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium 4 (Northwood or Prescott?!), Slot1, Slot 2, Socket 370, Socket 423, Socket 478, LGA 775, K6-III, K6-III+, K6-2+, Athlon, Athlon 4, Athlon MP, Athlon XP, Athlon 64, Duron, so many cores!, Cyrix III, VIA C5/C7, Transmeta, KT133, KT133A, KM133, KT266, KM266, KT266A, KT333, KT400, KT400A, K8T800, K8T890, K8M800 (etc!), nForce 220/420, nForce 2/400/Ultra 400, nForce 3 150/250/Ultra, nForce 4/Ultra/SLI, AMD 750/760, ATI wants to do chipsets too!!, SIS 630, 635, 645, 7xx, Intel 815, 815E, 820, 830, 845, 845E, 845G, 865, 865G, 875, SATA, PATA, SCSI, SAS, DDR, SDR, PC2100, PC2400(huh?), PC2700, PC3200, PC100, PC133, RDRAM RIMMs!, PC700, PC800, RAM chip density and chipset compatibility, USB 1/2, Firewire 400/800, EAX 2/3/4/5, OpenAL, AGP 2x/4x/8x, AGP slot compatibility, my favs games might need Glide or S3 Metal!, do I need the T&L and pixel shaders?!, PCIe, PCI, ACR, CMR, AMR, WinMe, Win2K, WinXP... :p
Most of that was done with or not fast enough by the time Windows XP was the default OS.

And some of that stuff will still run Windows 10/11 👀
 
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Celeron, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium 4 (Northwood or Prescott?!), Slot1, Slot 2, Socket 370, Socket 423, Socket 478, LGA 775, K6-III, K6-III+, K6-2+, Athlon, Athlon 4, Athlon MP, Athlon XP, Athlon 64, Duron, so many cores!, Cyrix III, VIA C5/C7, Transmeta, KT133, KT133A, KM133, KT266, KM266, KT266A, KT333, KT400, KT400A, K8T800, K8T890, K8M800 (etc!), nForce 220/420, nForce 2/400/Ultra 400, nForce 3 150/250/Ultra, nForce 4/Ultra/SLI, AMD 750/760, ATI wants to do chipsets too!!, SIS 630, 635, 645, 7xx, Intel 815, 815E, 820, 830, 845, 845E, 845G, 865, 865G, 875, SATA, PATA, SCSI, SAS, DDR, SDR, PC2100, PC2400(huh?), PC2700, PC3200, PC100, PC133, RDRAM RIMMs!, PC700, PC800, RAM chip density and chipset compatibility, USB 1/2, Firewire 400/800, EAX 2/3/4/5, OpenAL, AGP 2x/4x/8x, AGP slot compatibility, my favs games might need Glide or S3 Metal!, do I need the T&L and pixel shaders?!, PCIe, PCI, ACR, CMR, AMR, WinMe, Win2K, WinXP... :p
oh yeah, the Athon, when AMD CPUs cooked themselves to death. (video from 16 years ago)

 
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