5 ms·

That software experience does not look as bad as I was expecting. That performance is shockingly good, am I missing something? Comparable to a Titan RTX? Yes,

by mastax 3y ago

That software experience does not look as bad as I was expecting. That performance is shockingly good, am I missing something? Comparable to a Titan RTX? Yes, that card is 4 years older but it cost an order of magnitude more, has almost twice the die area, and has twice the GDDR6 bus width. The A770 theoretical FP16 is apparently a bit higher (39.2T vs 32.6T) but in gaming workloads the Arc cards far under-perform their theoretical performance compared to competitors. I guess ML is less demanding on the drivers, or perhaps some micro-architectural thing. In gaming performance the Titan RTX is about 70% faster than the A770. I'm really looking forward to the next generation now. https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/titan-rtx.c3311 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/titan-rtx.c3311 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/arc-a770.c3914 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/arc-a770.c3914

7speter 3y ago
From what I can understand, gaming is a strange workload that Nvida and AMD have a 20+ year head start on Intel. Deep learning and AI workloads are probably pretty straight forward as far as how it's implemented and run, but game developers do all sorts of hacky things to make their games work for the sake of meeting a given deadline (and ultimately, release date). The 20 year advantage of AMD and Nvidia comes from them optimizing their graphics drivers for all of the edgecase games as the games came out (this is why there may be a "The Last of Us" exclusive driver for Nvidia cards, for example). Intel has a massive backlog of games to work through to optimize for, and they also have to figure out what games are the ones to prioritize on their optimization todo list, I imagine.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Many of the DirectX issues on these cards can be almost entirely mitigated with DXVK. It's pretty well-documented at this point, but the Vulkan translation of older DX titles is better than using Intel's native DirectX driver. For Linux gamers, DXVK is how you'd be playing the game regardless. It's a first-gen card that's not a terrible prospect for the right sort of tinkerer.
kookamamie 3y ago
As you mentioned, Titan RTX is ancient when it comes to DL/ML use - if that has a 4-fold perf compared to Arc, it's not looking great. It's not like you can cram 10x Arc into a computer to make up for the gap.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > Titan RTX is ancient when it comes to DL/ML use I just checked ebay sold listings and Titan RTX cards are selling consistently for between $800 - $1600.
mastax 3y ago
* 50% more GDDR6 bus width

by mastax 3y ago

7speter 3y ago

From what I can understand, gaming is a strange workload that Nvida and AMD have a 20+ year head start on Intel. Deep learning and AI workloads are probably pretty straight forward as far as how it's implemented and run, but game developers do all sorts of hacky things to make their games work for the sake of meeting a given deadline (and ultimately, release date). The 20 year advantage of AMD and Nvidia comes from them optimizing their graphics drivers for all of the edgecase games as the games came out (this is why there may be a "The Last of Us" exclusive driver for Nvidia cards, for example). Intel has a massive backlog of games to work through to optimize for, and they also have to figure out what games are the ones to prioritize on their optimization todo list, I imagine.

smoldesu 3y ago
Many of the DirectX issues on these cards can be almost entirely mitigated with DXVK. It's pretty well-documented at this point, but the Vulkan translation of older DX titles is better than using Intel's native DirectX driver. For Linux gamers, DXVK is how you'd be playing the game regardless. It's a first-gen card that's not a terrible prospect for the right sort of tinkerer.

kookamamie 3y ago

As you mentioned, Titan RTX is ancient when it comes to DL/ML use - if that has a 4-fold perf compared to Arc, it's not looking great. It's not like you can cram 10x Arc into a computer to make up for the gap.

Eisenstein 3y ago
> Titan RTX is ancient when it comes to DL/ML use I just checked ebay sold listings and Titan RTX cards are selling consistently for between $800 - $1600.

mastax 3y ago

* 50% more GDDR6 bus width