Intel has acknowledged the performance concerns with its Arc GPUs, especially when paired with older CPUs, and has begun to investigate and address these issues.
Intel’s Response to Arc GPU Issues with Older Processors
When Intel launched the Arc B580 and B570 GPUs, they looked promising, offering more VRAM than their competitors. However, despite this, they didn’t quite make a splash in the charts due to subpar optimizations, which left many gamers unimpressed. The issue isn’t just with the GPU drivers; it’s a deeper problem affecting the Arc Battlemage GPUs’ performance compared to their rivals. Hardware Unboxed was one of the first to highlight the Arc B580’s underwhelming performance with older processors like the Ryzen 2000 and Intel’s 9th-gen chips.
For a while, Intel seemed to ignore these concerns, but they have finally responded on their forums. Here’s the message they released:
"Thank you for your patience. We are aware of reports of performance sensitivity in some games when paired with older generation processors. We have increased our platform coverage to include more configurations in our validation process, and we are continuing to investigate optimizations."
Intel’s statement acknowledges their awareness of the issue, but it’s evident they haven’t devoted enough attention to optimizing performance yet. They plan to widen their optimizations to various configurations, suggesting that a solution might be on the horizon, though they haven’t provided a specific timeline.
It’s clear that improvements will have to come from driver updates, since the current hardware can hold its ground against the latest opponents from its previous generation in new games. Surprisingly, the Arc B580 and B570 perform without a hitch with the latest Intel and AMD CPUs, which makes their poor compatibility with older Intel CPUs even more puzzling.
Looking ahead, if Intel implements new patches successfully, it could potentially stand up to AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. However, this doesn’t automatically mean Intel will start dominating the GPU space. The Arc Battlemage GPUs have mostly vanished from the market due to scarce availability, effectively removing them from the current budget segment competition.
Source: Intel
