4 ms·

badass. way to cut loose an old anchor. i love this trend: build well for the new thing, use open-source compatibility layers to make the old not-good microsoft

badass. way to cut loose an old anchor. i love this trend: build well for the new thing, use open-source compatibility layers to make the old not-good microsoft apis work. that said, intel arc has been slow as dirt for old games. they seem to have, through hard work, turned the corner. im curious how much of that improvement has gotten upstream to the public, to others. versus how much intel has done only for themselves, after putting all their eggs in this open source community project.

cesaref 4y ago
I imagine the problem is lack of game specific optimisations in their drivers. In any other field, hacking optimisations in to spot and optimise an algorithm that is used as a benchmark for the hardware would be considered close to fraud, but for the graphics crowd it's all in a days work.
- xxs 4y ago
  The difference with the benchmarks is that "games" are an actual work and a prime reason to buy the GPU, itself.
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  They don't do this only in benchmarks, they also do it in actual games too! Hearing that NVIDIA engineers actually re-implemented many of the un-optimized shaders released on triple-A games and made their drivers to dynamically swap to their shader implmentation on the fly, is a testament to how NVIDIA really did care about game driver performance.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  It comes down to the fact that in comparing GPUs from a general consumer perspective, unlike traditional benchmarking the goal isn't to look at the technical details of "how much time do these take to execute this exact same algorithm" but "how much time do these take to produce these visually indistinguishable images", since the end user doesn't really care if the algorithm being used is the same, they just want the same output to be produced faster.
  - mastax 4y ago
    I remember in 2008 or thereabouts there was some controversy because one vendor rendered some things at a higher quality than the other. It was a relatively small thing like the edges of alpha textures or texture filtering or something. There was a period of time where some video card reviews would include a visual quality comparison because there could be noticable differences between the two.
    - dotnet00 4y ago
      There were still various 'hard' fixed function components in GPUs which would cause that kind of visual difference back in the day. Technically this does sort of still happen these days (eg the period of time when NVIDIA cards had ray tracing support but AMD cards did not, the quality of the video encoder, or nowadays with the various super-resolution methods used by each vendor), in which case those do tend to get treated separately in third-party benchmarks since not everyone really cares for the quality of those.
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
If DirectX were an open source standard we would have had almost no problem writing translation layers between all the versions and other APIs. Unfortunately, since it's a reverse engineering hack job, there's still too much lost performance left on the table
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  So far, backward compatibility for D3D games on Windows has been excellent though. I really wonder why Intel is the only GPU vendor who has trouble supporting older D3D versions (and if this is such a problem for GPU vendors, why Microsoft doesn't step in and provide a generic D3D9-on-D3D12 driver). (also I think the actual problem isn't a generic D3D9 emulation, but that a good emulation needs to implement thousands of game-specific performance and compatibility hacks which are usually taken care of by the GPU vendor or Microsoft)
  - Scion9066 4y ago
    Microsoft seems to have provided some of that in the OS as open source here: https://github.com/microsoft/D3D9On12 https://github.com/microsoft/D3D9On12 Unfortunately, it looks like it's up to the application developer to support it, unless I'm reading it wrong.
    - fredoralive 4y ago
      Intel were apparently using that for backwards compatibility on Arc[1]. I guess it wasn't good enough and they're using DXVK instead? Or is this new "native" mode DXVK instead? [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/intel-turns-to-code-translation-to-run-old-directx9-games-on-its-newest-gpus/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/intel-turns-to-code-...
      - Scion9066 4y ago
        Their readme linked from the article mentions both D3D9On12 and dxvk as some of the licensed software being used: https://downloadmirror.intel.com/761751/readme.txt https://downloadmirror.intel.com/761751/readme.txt They may be using both of those. They mention in the video linked from the article that the driver is choosing between native and the hybrid approach where appropriate, depending on what game/app is running. Maybe they also choose between different hybrid options as well?

cesaref 4y ago

I imagine the problem is lack of game specific optimisations in their drivers. In any other field, hacking optimisations in to spot and optimise an algorithm that is used as a benchmark for the hardware would be considered close to fraud, but for the graphics crowd it's all in a days work.

xxs 4y ago
The difference with the benchmarks is that "games" are an actual work and a prime reason to buy the GPU, itself.
cyber_kinetist 4y ago
They don't do this only in benchmarks, they also do it in actual games too! Hearing that NVIDIA engineers actually re-implemented many of the un-optimized shaders released on triple-A games and made their drivers to dynamically swap to their shader implmentation on the fly, is a testament to how NVIDIA really did care about game driver performance.
dotnet00 4y ago
It comes down to the fact that in comparing GPUs from a general consumer perspective, unlike traditional benchmarking the goal isn't to look at the technical details of "how much time do these take to execute this exact same algorithm" but "how much time do these take to produce these visually indistinguishable images", since the end user doesn't really care if the algorithm being used is the same, they just want the same output to be produced faster.
- mastax 4y ago
  I remember in 2008 or thereabouts there was some controversy because one vendor rendered some things at a higher quality than the other. It was a relatively small thing like the edges of alpha textures or texture filtering or something. There was a period of time where some video card reviews would include a visual quality comparison because there could be noticable differences between the two.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    There were still various 'hard' fixed function components in GPUs which would cause that kind of visual difference back in the day. Technically this does sort of still happen these days (eg the period of time when NVIDIA cards had ray tracing support but AMD cards did not, the quality of the video encoder, or nowadays with the various super-resolution methods used by each vendor), in which case those do tend to get treated separately in third-party benchmarks since not everyone really cares for the quality of those.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago

If DirectX were an open source standard we would have had almost no problem writing translation layers between all the versions and other APIs. Unfortunately, since it's a reverse engineering hack job, there's still too much lost performance left on the table

flohofwoe 4y ago
So far, backward compatibility for D3D games on Windows has been excellent though. I really wonder why Intel is the only GPU vendor who has trouble supporting older D3D versions (and if this is such a problem for GPU vendors, why Microsoft doesn't step in and provide a generic D3D9-on-D3D12 driver). (also I think the actual problem isn't a generic D3D9 emulation, but that a good emulation needs to implement thousands of game-specific performance and compatibility hacks which are usually taken care of by the GPU vendor or Microsoft)
- Scion9066 4y ago
  Microsoft seems to have provided some of that in the OS as open source here: https://github.com/microsoft/D3D9On12 https://github.com/microsoft/D3D9On12 Unfortunately, it looks like it's up to the application developer to support it, unless I'm reading it wrong.
  - fredoralive 4y ago
    Intel were apparently using that for backwards compatibility on Arc[1]. I guess it wasn't good enough and they're using DXVK instead? Or is this new "native" mode DXVK instead? [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/intel-turns-to-code-translation-to-run-old-directx9-games-on-its-newest-gpus/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/intel-turns-to-code-...
    - Scion9066 4y ago
      Their readme linked from the article mentions both D3D9On12 and dxvk as some of the licensed software being used: https://downloadmirror.intel.com/761751/readme.txt https://downloadmirror.intel.com/761751/readme.txt They may be using both of those. They mention in the video linked from the article that the driver is choosing between native and the hybrid approach where appropriate, depending on what game/app is running. Maybe they also choose between different hybrid options as well?