Earlier this year, Intel announced plans to ship 4 million individual Arc Alchemist gaming GPUs in 2022, but many observers considered the target fairly conservative. Now, following multiple launch delays and limited availability, Intel said this week and this year it will miss the shipment of discrete GPUs.Surprisingly, the company is blaming the integrated graphics driver built into it. CPU Due to delays in the discrete GPU lineup and lower-than-expected sales.
Overall, Intel needed a brand new driver built from scratch to deploy discrete gaming GPUs for desktops and laptops. However, the driver for the discrete gaming GPU was not comparable to the driver provided by AMD or Nvidia because we chose to use the same graphics driver that we used for the low power integrated graphics present on the CPU. ..
“Software releases on discrete graphics were clearly poor performance,” Gelsinger said. “I thought I could take advantage of the integrated graphics software stack, but it wasn’t quite enough for the required performance level, game compatibility, etc. Therefore, to reach the goal of 4 million units in discrete graphics space. I can’t, even though I’m currently catching up with and getting better software releases. ”
Signs of this problem appeared earlier this week when Intel ended support for Day 0 gaming GPU drivers for integrated GPUs based on its “Gen” architecture (10th generation and below). However, Intel will continue to provide Day 9 game GPU driver support only for integrations and discrete GPUs based on the latest Xe architecture. As a result, the Intel Graphics Driver package will include two drivers. One is for Xe-based GPUs (11th-Gen and above) and the other is for legacy Gen-based GPUs (10th-Gen and earlier).
This move will allow Intel to refocus its software development resources (people, time, hardware) on driver development for Xe discrete GPUs to make it more competitive. Meanwhile, the drivers that Intel’s Xe-HPG-based GPUs have today allow the company to use entry-level Arc A380 series graphics cards to serve laptops and less demanding customers in China and Southeast Asia.
“We can’t reach our GPU unit goals, but we’re on track to reach over $ 1 billion in revenue this year.” Said Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said Thursday in the company’s earnings announcement. “In the second quarter, we launched enhancements to Intel Arc graphics for OEM-powered laptops such as Samsung, Lenovo, Acer, HP and Asus. COVID-related supply chain issues and proprietary software support challenges. Has caused an availability delay. Intel ArcA5 and A7 desktop cards will begin shipping in the third quarter. ”
Today, PC OEMs and end users need one integrated GPU driver to support all existing products and some previous generation products. This simplifies PC building for OEMs and maintenance for IT departments and end users, but the integrated driver has some caveats regarding common PC games, especially Intel’s integrated and stand-alone GPUs. I have.
- If you want to ensure a consistent gaming experience on all GPUs launched in the last eight years, you need to make sure that your new game can run properly on eight different generations of products based on different architectures (Gen and Xe). ..
- This requires resources to test previous generation integrated GPUs and create appropriate code paths optimized for GPUs that few people use for new games. As a result, resources that may be spent tuning the performance of the new glossy discrete GPU are wasted on the old integrated GPU.
- On the other hand, embedded GPU users tend to play older games, so GPU makers ensure that new drivers don’t affect compatibility with older software that isn’t used by the owners of the latest standalone GPUs. is needed.
- Since all programs are iterative, some code written for Gen-based integrated GPUs a few years ago would provide a discrete GPU with Xe, which could be very inefficient. there is.
- Certain performance optimizations that work well on integrated GPUs may also be enabled on discrete graphics processors with Xe for some reason, which can lead to instability and inadequate quality degradation.
- Something like GPU memory management behaves differently on embedded and standalone graphics processors, so this part of the stack needs to be completely rewritten for the latter.
Ironically, when Intel first learned in early January that it could miss the first quarter launch window, Intel’s Arc graphics from demanding gamers to content creators and laptop users. We talked about relocation.
