One line of code – that's all it took to achieve a massive increase in ray tracing performance on Intel's Arc Alchemist GPUs, courtesy of Intel graphics driver engineer Lionel Landwerlin. With Intel's new graphics cards reeling a bit with performance issues and driver startup issues, it's a welcome sight.
Landwerlin describes the change as "like a 100x improvement (no kidding)" in the text description of his merge request for the new line of code. It sounds like hyperbole, but a quick search of the request details immediately shows that it isn't.
Don't worry; We will not get too complicated with this explanation. Intel's "Alchemist" DG2 GPU has been in development for years, and Intel has aimed to implement Vulkan ray tracing capabilities since at least 2020. When this driver was originally written, a minor oversight by the original engineer caused the GPU to fail. It will take advantage of system memory. . (the RAM mounted on the motherboard) instead of local memory (the onboard VRAM of the GPU).
This caused a huge performance hit because the GPU had to communicate with system memory to process the ray tracing directives, which introduced an unacceptable level of memory latency. The fix, a single line of code that marks local memory for the ray tracing process allocation, means performance is now at the level it should have been all along.
Analysis: Intel needs every advantage it can get right now
Intel's long-delayed Arc series of GPUs is finally appearing in the wild, with budget A3 cards now available in select Asian markets, while more powerful gaming-oriented A7 GPUs are already being teased for a global launch.
However, Intel should be worried; First impressions of the Arc have been lackluster, and serious competition is on the way in the form of Nvidia's Lovelace and AMD's RDNA 3 GPUs. The first-gen Arc cards appear to rival current-gen offerings from Team Green and Team Red, but Intel needs to get those cards on sale quickly if it wants to secure significant market share.
This driver fix, combined with signs that Intel may have erred on the side of caution with Arc cards' power consumption, resulting in lower initial game performance, indicates that Intel could still remain competitive. with the best cards on the market. We're still hopeful that the Arc series will become a serious competitor to GeForce and Radeon, but only time will tell. But hey, at least the crypto miners won't rip them up.
From Phoronix (Opens in a new tab).