Key Fix Incoming For Intel Arc GPUs, Should You Consider One For Your Gaming PC?
If you haven't heard, Intel's graphics cards are actually good. However, the veracity of that reality strongly depends on your system's CPU. If you're rocking an older-gen chip, chances are you might be significantly less impressed with a new Arc GPU's performance. Fortunately, Intel has finally acknowledged this issue and notes that it is investigating optimizations.
The idea that Intel's Arc GPUs are disproportionately sensitive to single-threaded CPU performance was initially explored by our friends up north at Hardware Canucks before being blown wide open by reports from numerous outlets, including us right here at HotHardware. In our review of the Arc B570, we tested multiple graphics cards across three games and five CPUs and found that Intel's chips did indeed suffer a much larger performance penalty than the competition on slower CPUs, even with Resizable BAR enabled.
When we say "slower CPUs," we're not talking about some old Intel Haswell 4th-gen stuff, or an AMD FX chip. We're talking about dropping as much as 20% of performance on something as new as a Ryzen 7 5800X3D. It gets even worse when you step further back; our Ryzen 7 3700X gives 1% low framerates as poor as 58% of our result with the Core Ultra 9 285K. Meanwhile, the Radeon RX 7600 barely changes in performance even when connected to a Core i5-11400—and the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti actually *gains* performance moving to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D.
This kind of CPU sensitivity isn't unheard-of. Back in the DirectX 6-7 days, 3dfx's Voodoo graphics cards were notorious for being significantly more reliant on CPU horsepower than the competition. However, if you had a fast enough CPU, they still offered excellent performance. We see a similar situation here, where the Arc B580 kicks serious butt on a fast platform, but falls off pretty bad as an upgrade option for older systems.
This is a real issue, and Hardware Canucks first broke the story back on January 2nd, so it's pretty crazy that it has taken Intel this long to comment on it. On the other hand, we're glad that Intel finally has acknowledged the problem and that its drivers may be seeing some improvement in that regard soon. Intel's Arc driver team has done marvelous work in the relatively short time that it has existed, so we're hopeful that Intel can patch up this major problem.
Credit to Videocardz for the spot.
