Lots of driver updates in four months

BY JARRED WALTON

Intel’s Arc A-Series lineup currently consists of four desktop cards, (from left to right) the Intel A770 16GB LE, ASRock A770 8GB, Intel A750 LE, and Gunnir A380. The A580 remains in limbo.

© INTEL

INTEL’S ARC GPUs officially launched at the end of 2022, though the exact launch date for some models is hard to nail down. The A380 first appeared in China in the spring, but it wasn’t available to purchase in the US until August. The faster A770 and A750 cards launched in October, but it was another six weeks before the A770 8GB could be found.

We’ve talked about the fundamentals of the Arc Alchemist architecture (see Holiday 2022 issue), and all our Arc graphics cards reviews over the past few months (including the ASRock A770 8GB this issue, page 76) have mentioned drivers as a potential pain point. But Intel says things have improved a lot over the past four months and claims significant performance gains with the latest drivers.

Challenge accepted! We set about retesting every Arc graphics card on the original 3490 launch drivers (the A380 was first available with the 3259 drivers, but we opted to stick with the 3490 drivers from the A770/A750 launch) and then re-tested every card with the latest 4123 drivers. Let’s see how much has changed.

PLUGGING THE HOLES

Arc arrived with arguably the best GPU drivers Intel has ever created, but that’s not saying much. A few years ago, it wasn’t uncommon to see games refuse to work on Intel’s integrated graphics solutions—and even those games that did often performed poorly. Intel’s DG1 (see sidebar) helped pave the way for more frequent driver updates, but things were still iffy back in 2021.

Since the first dedicated Arc A380 cards started showing up in China, which meant they also started getting shipped around the world, Intel has been cranking out updated drivers on a regular basis. There are presently 11 different versions of Arc drivers available from Intel, five WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) certified and six beta drivers, but there were at least five other ‘hotfix’ or beta drivers that are no longer listed.