Intel discovered 43 bugs with the Intel Arc A380 after watching a review from Gamers Nexus which then led to many fixes in the new beta driver release. It is not the first time that the popular PC hardware review site has called out a manufacturer for defects or detrimental issues with a product but as Intel discovered, an in-depth review can also help to clarify the widely known GPU driver issues the Arc cards have had.
Lisa Pearce (Intel Vice President and General Manager for the Visual Compute Group) commented on the findings of Gamers Nexus on Intel’s blog. She explained how the review assisted in the process for the latest driver which addresses 21 of the 39 remaining issues. She said that 4 of the issues had already been addressed previously (the review was posted on August 1 but those issues had been resolved sometime before the end of July) and that Intel is examining reports from other reviews for more potential fixes.
We appreciate the feedback we are getting in early reviews of our Arc software stack. And it has been bumpy. We have received frank feedback from press during recent reviews, and we have taken it to heart. For example, we filed 43 issues with our engineering team from a review of the A380 by Gamers Nexus. We had corrected 4 of those issues by the end of July. Since then, we corrected 21 UI issues in our driver release on August 19th, and it also includes Day0 support for Saints Row, Madden NFL 23, fixes for Stray and Horizon Zero Dawn crashes, Marvel’s Spider-Man performance fix, and fixes on SmoothSync corruptions. We are taking similar approaches with reports from other press reviews.
Lisa Pearce went on to explain that the installer itself was in part to blame for some of the issues and that Intel is working on other solutions with it. Intel had tried to streamline the driver installation process but that path has proven to be unreliable and Intel is now looking at a complete package installer that will be released later this year to help facilitate a trouble-free installation.
We are continuing to learn what it will take for us to be successful. Some of the issues were related to our installer and how it downloaded unique components after initial installation. This allows us to have a smaller initial download to get users started quicker. But unexpected failures are causing that process to be unreliable, and later this year we will be moving to a combined package that is downloaded and installed all at once. No more installer issues.