My Feedback & Suggestions for Intel Arc A750/770 and Driver

[duskstalker]

Hello,

I'm currently testing the A750/A770 for my workstation workloads and gaming and I want to share my experiences with you to hopefully help to improve arc.

Test System:

Ryzen 5 3600
MSI B350 Carbon (latest bios with rebar enabled)
2x16GB DDR4 3600 CL18
Intel Arc A750/A770 - Driver: 31.0.101.3802
Fresh Windows 10 22h1 Install with all updates.

Monitors: Acer Predator xb323ugp (32", WQHD, 170hz, Wide Gamut) via DP and LG C9 55" 4k 120hz OLED TV via HDMI 2.1

What i tested:

Affinity Photo
Capture One 23
Davinci Resolve 18

Games:
League of Legends

Impressions:

Capture One: works flawlessly, snappy performance, no openCL errors/image corruption - i have experienced sluggy performance and image corruption with a radeon vega 56.

Affinity Photo + Benchmark Scores: good brush performance, no image corruption. In the integrated Benchmark the A750 scored 8000 raster points, while a vega 56 (flashed to v64 bios) scored 5000 raster points in the benchmark on the same system. on newer radeon cards the openCL mode is broken, all RDNA 1 and 2 cards score around 1000 here, even a 6900XT. in the affinity forum someone published their results with an RTX 3080 paired with a ryzen 5 5800X and this system scored 10500 points. it is worth nothing that the raster score scales with cpu aswell, so a respectable result for the A750 with just running a R5 3600.

Davinci Resolve: i did some simple testing and everything worked like it should - its hard to quantify performance - lets just say the timeline performance feels alot snappier than with a vega 56 in the same system. Im looking forward to retest with the A770 with 16gb of memory, because for my 4k 10bit footage, 8gb of Vram is a bottleneck on the A750 and Vega 56 alike.

With those results at hand, i really hope intel can work on further improving their very promising showing in these productivity tasks. we all know gaming isnt exactly the strong point for arc just now, but i see ALOT of potential for productivity with some gaming after doing work and i really hope intel will expand on that.

Now for League of Legends: I tried playing it on my C9 Oled in 4k and to my surprise the A750 was actually capable of pushing north of 300 fps fresh into the game. but framerate will eventually drop to 80-120 fps over the course of a normal game. It seems normal that after 20-30 minutes the average fps drop, but for the A750 it becomes a little uncomfortable. i hope intel can improve the dx9 translation to keep league of legends at about 150fps all the time. this would be plenty sufficient to be perfectly playable.

Now after the first impressions, lets get into the feedback and suggestion section:

Adaptive Sync / VRR: Straight up - i could not get that working on the LG C9 via HDMI with only the Arc Driver on the system. I found it highly irritating that i need to get into windows settings to enable VRR - this needs to be in the arc driver! after enabling it, it still wouldnt work. i found a post on twitter from capframex who stated that he had to install the intel graphics command center to get it working. i moved the system to the acer predator xb323u monitor and tried via display port. and here, after installing the graphics command center, adaptive sync worked.
i still need to retest VRR on the LG C9 after installing the graphics command center - but either way - please make sure that VRR actually works without any other beta software outside the arc driver.

display color depth setting: the acer predator XB323UGP is a 10bit FRC (8+2) monitor with >95% adobe rgb color gamut - in the radeon driver i can set that display to accept 10bit input color depth, but i cannot with arc. the driver wouldnt give me a setting to change it, windows and the graphics command center wouldnt neither. please include an option into the arc driver to manually set display color depth like amd and nvidia do.

frame limiter: in short: its missing. there is a setting in the driver to cap framerate at maximum monitor refresh rate, but that setting actually doesnt work in league of legends. its also best practice to actually limit fps slightly below max refresh rate to keep the fps from overshooting the max refresh rate occasionally and trigger vsync or tearing. i imagine this is what the setting is supposed to do, but like i said, i couldnt get it to work. and it would also help to have the freedom to set any fps the user wants. the only way to limit fps in league of legends is to use the ingame frame limiter or vsync, which both is not optimal.

General Arc Driver Feedback:

1. Please make it a free floating window instead of a fullscreen overlay. it is so annoying to use.

- you cannot have it open and put the window aside to e.g. use the browser to google settings
- it automatically closes when you click outside the main window
- windows always throw a popup, when you open it.
- when you switch between different tabs, the window size constantly changes. super annoying.

2. the "Driver" tab doesnt do anything except delivering advertisement and asking for cookies constantly. make this a useful menu - listing current driver version, possible updates and maybe a color depth setting, frame limiter and variable refresh rate setting?

3. in the gaming tab you cannot delete manually added games. this needs a delete button.

4. performance tab: the live performance monitoring information is blurry - looks like pixel upscaling. its also laggy. i didnt test overclock.


i hope this was helpful and i also hope this reaches the developers. looking forward to improvements. if there is something that i should retest or you need further information on, please let me know. im happy to help.

best regards!

[duskstalker]

i dont seem to be able to edit my post, but i still wanted to share:

i retested variable refresh rate with the lg c9 and the graphics command center installed and it seems to be working fine. it indeed seems like the command center is mandatory for VRR to work.

[powerarmour]

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@duskstalker wrote:

i retested variable refresh rate with the lg c9 and the graphics command center installed and it seems to be working fine. it indeed seems like the command center is mandatory for VRR to work.

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Good to hear, but yes you need the IGCC to enable VRR correctly, and tbh I only use the IGCC app with my A770 (Arc Control doesn't need to be installed luckily).

Otherwise the lack of colorspace settings over DP connections is frustrating (it's all hardcoded at the moment, and will only switch with HDR), and there should ideally be a working frame limiter also, totally agree with that.

[Daniel001]

Hi

no one is mentioning the absence of an overscan adjustment in the intel control panel for an hdtv.

i have an a750 connected to a Panasonic 42 inch plasma tv and i need an over scan in the control center the the edge of the desktop is missing

its odd, one would think, they would look at the other 2 competitors and

see the display options needed.