Intel has taken a significant step forward with their Arc GPUs by acknowledging and tackling the performance issues they’ve been having with older CPUs.
Intel Addresses Arc GPU Performance Challenges with Older Ryzen and Intel Core Processors
The Arc B580 and B570 GPUs initially seemed promising at launch, primarily because they offered more VRAM than their competitors. However, they haven’t made much impact, and one major reason for this is the subpar optimization of the chips.
The problem isn’t confined to Intel’s GPU drivers; it’s a broader issue that has set the Arc Battlemage GPUs back compared to rival offerings. If you recall, Hardware Unboxed was quick to highlight that the Arc B580 struggled when matched with older processors like the Ryzen 2000 and Intel’s 9th generation Core processors.
This issue had lingered for quite some time without much acknowledgment from Intel—until now. Intel finally addressed the problem on their forums, and here’s the statement they released:
Thank you for your patience. We are aware of reports of performance sensitivity in some games when paired with older generation processors.
We have increased our platform coverage to include more configurations in our validation process, and we are continuing to investigate optimizations.
From this statement, it seems Intel was aware of the issue but hadn’t prioritized optimization efforts until now. They’re planning to broaden their optimization efforts to cover more configurations, so we can expect a resolution in the foreseeable future—though Intel hasn’t provided a specific timeline for the update.
To keep up with competitors, Intel will need to focus on driver updates, since their current hardware rivals the previous generation in recent games. Surprisingly, it’s mainly with their older CPUs that the Arc B580 or B570 falters, while pairing with the newest Intel and AMD CPUs shows no performance degradation.
The hope is that with forthcoming patches, Intel can better compete with AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. However, this doesn’t guarantee a significant market shift in favor of Intel. The Arc Battlemage GPUs’ limited availability has, unfortunately, side-tracked them in the budget GPU market race.
News Source: Intel
