Okay, folks, Intel has finally released a new driver for its dearest Arc GPU for Q3 2023 and is ready to show off its fruits of optimizing the heck out of it day in and day out.
Driver updates are all about performance gain and Intel did spend no less time optimizing DirectX 9 titles since the hottest competitive games around the world are all running DirectX 9 at the very least since their debut.
Under 1080p Ultra settings, 13 titles have been tested with various levels of FPS improvement across the board, with CS:GO taking the lead at 77% alongside Skyrim.
Not only PvP games are tested but also PvE classics like Left 4 Dead 2 and Payday 2 are also in the mix, getting 20% and 39% increase in overall performance respectively.
Moving over to the DX11 department, you also have degrees of improvements here with the main beneficiaries being, you guessed it, competitive online games.
Although LoL is the lone title capable of utilizing some of the best monitors in the market offering 360Hz refresh rate, Valorant players would be delighted to see the number 2 getting flipped to 3!
Now for the actual big gun Intel has pulled out. Meet the PresentMon (Beta because it’s still in beta duh), an in-house developed telemetry tool that will help benchmarkers to test out systems in a new way.
Think of it as an Intel-branded MSI Afterburner but way better.
This open-sourced software provides new and old ways to test any sort of hardware since it supports all sorts of popular vendor and AIB partner cards. From the classic overlay with real-time graph display to metrics and telemetry capture, power users especially seasoned benchmarkers can easily adapt to the PresentMon no problem.
One of the more interesting parameter one can test and measure is the “GPU Busy” parameter. Just taking this image as an example when the bottleneck is CPU-responsible, you’ll see that the GPU Busy gap is significantly shorter than the waiting period on the CPU’s frametime, resulting in bad performance.
With PresentMon, benchmarkers will be able to trace and discover the actual bottleneck so that they could come up with a balanced setup that matches both the CPU and GPU’s call and wait cycle as close as possible.
To allow each benchmarker to have their own defined parameters to track, Intel also provided some clean interfaces in the backend settings page with high levels of customizability.
Overlay-wise, things are even easier with sliders and individual selections alongside toggles and I highly appreciate the tooltip as well.
New to the scene and needed a “wizard” to help you? Intel’s got you covered as well, with several presets and toggles available to choose from the get go.
All in all, the driver update for the Intel Arc GPU shows that Team Blue is serious about providing bang-for-buck graphics cards when Team Green is all about hard-selling AI and overcharging its customers in some cases while AMD follows it up with some pretty cool but not the best products for the more budget constrained fellow.
