Intel will not provide Arc drivers without benchmark optimization
Intel had actually promised to release an update in April with new features for the new Intel ARC graphics. So far, however, nothing of the kind has come out. Intel is silent about this rather than talking openly about possible delays. This comes from a report by Neowin online magazine. It says Intel promised in late March that a driver update would be coming that would add some UI switches for Arc GPUs. Intel executive Lisa Pearce had that in one blog post promised by the company and announced at the time that this feature update would be released in April. However, the most recent update available is from early April and has no corresponding changes on board.
Why is the update important?
The new function should allow users to realistically check the full (potential) performance of their Arc graphics cards, ie to perform benchmark tests. Intel had been working on an option to disable benchmark-specific optimizations. Without this option, all Underwriters Laboratories (UL) 3DMark testing runs with optimizations that make performance appear about 15 percent better, but at the same time invalidate all inputs due to UL guidelines. The switch function allows the user to complete UL tests and get a valid score. Unfortunately, this is still not the case as such a driver is not available. Intel published the announcement in a blog post: “We’ve included these benchmark-specific optimizations in the version of our driver we’re releasing today on Intel.com so we can showcase the full capabilities of our new Arc graphics products.
Spy for We, for example, see an impact of about 15% when benchmark-specific optimizations are implemented, depending on the specific Intel Arc graphics SKU. We have informed UL that these benchmark optimizations will be enabled in our first releases and our driver in Compliance with UL- benchmark guidelines will not be a UL-approved driver for now. By the end of April, we will add a UI option that allows users to enable and disable these benchmark-specific tweaks. This will give anyone the opportunity to realize the peak potential of the Intel Arc hardware from a fully optimized workload and overall benchmark performance l feature is enabled and benchmark optimizations are disabled by default, the driver is eligible for UL approval.”
Since Intel Arc is not yet on the market worldwide, fewer users are likely to be affected by the delayed driver update. Since benchmark fraud is a real source of excitement, Intel should have communicated a little more clearly why there are delays and why the announced update is taking a long time.
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