Guild Wars 2 and Intel ARC

[Veprovina.4876]

I'm curious...

 

Since Intel's new ARC GPUs don't support DX9-11 (why Intel??? WHY?), and use some kind of translation layer for that, the performance in those kinds of games is pretty bad.

Does anyone have one or tested one in GW2? What's the verdict? I doubt those cards can do 4k but what about 1080p or 1440p?

 

So, the devs didn't see the point of porting GW2 to DX12, but you think that might change in the future?

Or will maybe d912pxy be relevant again? 😄

 

I'm not sure why you would ever drop support for older directx, but i guess with beefier hardware, and diminishing requirements of older games, Intel thought they have enough beef to just brute force it. Oh the irony...

 

Anyway... Thoughts?

I'm not really considering getting the card, i'm just curious how that translation layer works in GW2, and if there's maybe DX12 in GW2s future. Or maybe vulkan? 😄 

Edited October 12, 2022 by Veprovina.4876

[Balgorath.2604]

Probably because they are designing their GPU's for today's tech and not 10 year old games.  I do agree that they are shooting themselves in the foot a little but judging from the many videos I've watched on comparison to AMD and  Nvidia, Intel has a ways to go to be competitive 

[Khisanth.2948]

2 hours ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

Since Intel's new ARC GPUs don't support DX9-11 (why Intel??? WHY?)

Only 9.

2 hours ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

I'm not sure why you would ever drop support for older directx, but i guess with beefier hardware, and diminishing requirements of older games, Intel thought they have enough beef to just brute force it. Oh the irony...

It seems part of the problem was that they were building their arc drivers on top of work from their iGPUs but it turns out things tuned for those do not actually work that well for the discrete cards.

As for the general approach of API translations, it has been demonstrated that it can work well based on the various efforts for running games on Linux since that is translating everything to Vulkan.

The problem isn't the general approach but Intel's specific implementation.

2 hours ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

Or will maybe d912pxy be relevant again? 😄

Author of that has apparently stopped maintaining it but DXVK which translate DirectX 9/10/11 to Vulkan works on windows as well.

https://rk.edu.pl/en/intel-arc-a380-first-look-at-intel-discrete-graphics-card/#7

That is Star Craft 2 using Intel's DX9->12 vs DXVK's 9->Vulkan. Almost 50% higher for the average FPS and nearly 350% higher for the lows. On the bright side it does show the problem is more software than hardware. Getting the Intel card is still gambling on them improving their software in a timely manner. It might make sense to gamble if they were cheaper than the competitor but they are not.

To go back to the previous question of why did they drop dx9. Well even on that page which is using their lowest end card and using their implementation it is achieving over 130 FPS average. On its own that isn't bad. Where it becomes bad is when you compare them to competing products.  Ultimately it comes down to the specific set of games you play and how they perform on the different cards.

[Veprovina.4876]

On 10/12/2022 at 5:08 PM, Balgorath.2604 said:

Probably because they are designing their GPU's for today's tech and not 10 year old games.  I do agree that they are shooting themselves in the foot a little but judging from the many videos I've watched on comparison to AMD and  Nvidia, Intel has a ways to go to be competitive 

Well, DX9 games, with all the beef today's hardware has, really shouldn't be a problem even with translation layers. 

Maybe Intel can fix it, idk, but yeah, the cards do perform fine in "today's" games.

I wonder if they can fix that DX9 performance with drivers...

 

On 10/12/2022 at 7:06 PM, Khisanth.2948 said:

Only 9.

Oh seriously? I could have sworn they said DX11 as well.

In that case, GW2 should run pretty smooth right?

 

On 10/12/2022 at 7:06 PM, Khisanth.2948 said:

It seems part of the problem was that they were building their arc drivers on top of work from their iGPUs but it turns out things tuned for those do not actually work that well for the discrete cards.

So you think they can address the performance issues with driver updates? That would be pretty cool if that's the case.

On 10/12/2022 at 7:06 PM, Khisanth.2948 said:

As for the general approach of API translations, it has been demonstrated that it can work well based on the various efforts for running games on Linux since that is translating everything to Vulkan.

The problem isn't the general approach but Intel's specific implementation.

Yeah, GW2 runs on DXVK and D912pxy worked better than the native version at the time.

And like i said, i wonder if they can fix that with drivers. 

I mean, if it's just an implementation issue...

On 10/12/2022 at 7:06 PM, Khisanth.2948 said:

Author of that has apparently stopped maintaining it but DXVK which translate DirectX 9/10/11 to Vulkan works on windows as well.

https://rk.edu.pl/en/intel-arc-a380-first-look-at-intel-discrete-graphics-card/#7

That is Star Craft 2 using Intel's DX9->12 vs DXVK's 9->Vulkan. Almost 50% higher for the average FPS and nearly 350% higher for the lows. On the bright side it does show the problem is more software than hardware.

I use DXVK for Saint's Row 2 lol. Works better than the native thing. 

On 10/12/2022 at 7:06 PM, Khisanth.2948 said:

Getting the Intel card is still gambling on them improving their software in a timely manner. It might make sense to gamble if they were cheaper than the competitor but they are not.

Yeah, they entered at a very weird time. I mean, miner cards will be dropping prices of the new ones now, and with performance difference, idk...

But, on the other hand, if no one gambles, that will still leave us with AMD vs Nvidia and an unhealthy "duopoly" of GFX cards...

Cause Nvidia dominates, so it's more like monopoly, and Nvidia has shown they're not above price gouging and other shenanigans so... Idk. Might be good to support them, even with lower end gfx cards lol.

On 10/12/2022 at 7:06 PM, Khisanth.2948 said:

To go back to the previous question of why did they drop dx9. Well even on that page which is using their lowest end card and using their implementation it is achieving over 130 FPS average. On its own that isn't bad. Where it becomes bad is when you compare them to competing products.  Ultimately it comes down to the specific set of games you play and how they perform on the different cards.

I guess that problem will solve itself in time as hardware becomes so powerful that even APUs have no problem running old DX9 games... So... I guess they're going for the brute force approach... 

I mean, system requirements for DX9 games aren't going up, but new systems are getting more powerful. 

So the problem should solve itself pretty much, if it hasn't already.

[Mordacain.7052]

I picked up an A770 for my workstation to play around with and it runs Guild Wars 2 just fine (assuming you setup DXVK on Windows). Arc performance improves dramatically using the modern APIs and it really shows on Guild Wars 2. It takes awhile for the shader cache to generate and this is compounded anytime you enter an area you haven't visited before (since installation of the card). A word of warning, the drivers are still hot garbage and I would not want to rely on the Arc if it was my only graphics card. I've encountered many hard crashes, screen artifacts (typically leading to a system halt) and various other bugs. The arc command center is similarly terrible.

All of that being said, the architecture actually is pretty interesting and I think it will perform well as drivers mature.