Intel's second fastest Arc Alchemist GPU for laptops has seen benchmark leaks and the results are mixed, though we have to be very careful when interpreting them.
There are two sets of benchmarks from a Weibo user (opens in a new tab), supposedly for both real-world gaming performance (opens in a new tab) and testing synthetics (opens in a new tab). tab), as reported by HXL on Twitter (and spotted by Tom's Hardware (opens in a new tab) and VideoCardz (opens in a new tab)).
The inhabitant of the Chinese social media platform Weibo, who goes by the name "Golden Pig Update", apparently bought a Machenike gaming laptop (which recently became available, but only in China) with an Intel Arc A730M processor. and Core i7-12700H. (Alder Lake). As mentioned, the A730M is part of the higher-end A7 family, but it's the second best offering after the flagship A770M – these GPUs have 24 and 32 Xe cores respectively.
Let's look at the synthetic benchmarks first, in which the A730M managed a graphics score of 10,107 on 3DMark TimeSpy, which is faster than an Nvidia RTX 3070 laptop GPU (and not that far behind the 3070 Ti, d'in another place).
Additionally, 3DMark Fire Strike scores were also shared for the Arc A730M, by the laptop manufacturer, in this case, and this placed the Arc GPU a bit lower, between the RTX 3060 and 3070.
However, real-world gaming performance metrics turned out to be quite different, according to this Weibo leak.
Golden Pig Upgrade tested the Arc A730M with a small selection of games and saw an average of 70 fps (frames per second) recorded with Metro Exodus at 1080p resolution (with high details) and 123 fps with F1 2020 at 1080p (with high details). tall) . Assassin's Creed Odyssey, however, only managed 38fps at 1080p (at very high detail), dipping to irregular lows of 10fps as the lowest recorded frame rate.
Also, speaking of minimum frame rates, while Metro Exodus managed a good average frame rate here, it fell to a very low low of 9fps, even slower than Assassin's Creed in that regard.
Obviously, the results here are somewhat mixed and certainly put the A730M under the 3DMark benchmarks. As Tom's Hardware points out, Metro Exodus' frame rates are comparable to the RTX 3060, but with Assassin's Creed Odyssey the performance is closer to the RTX 3050.
Review: A confusing overview of performance
Hay mucho para desempacar aquí, pero todo debe tomarse con grandes cantidades de condimentos variados, seguro. There are a whole host of caveats, not the least of which is that we should be wary of the purported benchmark results posted on Weibo (although it's true that laptop maker Machenike also provided a 3DMark result, as indicated).
The 3DMark scores certainly look impressive, and maybe even too impressive when you remember that this is Intel's second-best A7 GPU, and not even the flagship, yet it apparently beats the RTX 3070 in one benchmark. . However, synthetic tests like these aren't as valuable a metric as actual gaming performance, and Intel may have significantly optimized its graphics driver for these types of tests.
On the other hand, the graphics driver has clearly not been fully refined for some of the games tested, given those drops to very low minimum frame rates, indicating "drivers in progress". In fact, we don't know which version of the driver was used here, but this is clearly an early working version (one not officially supported, given that the Alchemist driver with A730M support was released today). The Weibo user also noted that Shadow of the Tomb Raider turned out to be impossible to run for benchmarking purposes, it would just crash and not load at all.
There are also other variables possible in combination with game benchmarks, such as whether the Dynamic Tuning Technology (DTT) driver is enabled; that's Intel's take on intelligent power allocation between the CPU and GPU, but it was found to still be. a bit wobbly and hamper performance.
Overall, the potential performance of the A730M is still a hard picture to tease out from these early benchmark previews, but it all points to something we've been theorizing about for a while. Namely, Intel still needs to work on software for Arc GPUs, and the delays we're seeing on the desktop graphics card front are likely related to this need for further work on driver optimization.
The obvious problem with the delay is that, as Intel spends more and more time shaping software, the release of next-gen graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia draws ever closer, and GPU comparisons will become in a much more difficult area for Arc Alchemist. products.
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