The entire press presentation is posted at the bottom of the page. Make sure to check out DX11 Improvements for Intel Arc GPUs and New Gaming Performance Tool on Intel’s Graphics YouTube Channel for more info.
Performance Updates
Today, the Intel Arc Graphics team has brought a Q3 2023 update, providing a new testing tool, a new GPU metric, and continuing improvement to DX11 performance. Intel emphasizes the attractive pricing of the Intel Arc A750 at $249, offering a great starting price for balanced builds paired with a 12th or 13th Gen Intel Core i5 or Core i7 CPUs.
From launch, to now, Intel claims a 43% improvement in DirectX 9 games and continuing performance improvement for DirectX 11-based games. Intel’s chart shows gains in DX11 for the Intel Arc A750 as big as 33% in Overwatch 2 with much improved 99th percentile performance. Intel claims an average FPS improvement of 19% in DX11 games from the launch driver.
GPU Busy
One of the big improvements in performance has been frametime and “GPU Busy” performance in the software pipeline. You can think of GPU Busy as the wait time the GPU has to wait for the CPU to ‘do its stuff’ in layman’s terms. In a sense, Intel has thus reduced CPU utilization and the overall balance of CPU and GPU performance, allowing them to have a more harmonious relationship. The slides below detail the pipeline, and how GPU Busy is relevant. You can read more about GPU Busy here.
Basically, you want the Yellow Line (GPU Busy) to be much closer to the Blue Line (Frametime) in Intel’s graphs, shown below. In the past, GPU Busy and Frametime were separated by large degrees at times, meaning you might be more CPU bound as the GPU waits. But with the latest work on its drivers GPU Busy and Frametime can now co-exist as friends. This means a better balance between CPU-bound and GPU-bound workloads, allowing the GPU to be less bothered by CPU bound scenarios which means less stuttering, less frametime issues, and the driver pipeline can just ‘get it done.’
Intel PresentMon Beta
To record this new metric of “GPU Busy” Intel has updated its PresentMon software, which was previously command line only. In the new Intel PresentMon Beta, this performance overlay and capture tool has a new UI integrated, making it easy to use for everyone. The program will be extremely configurable, with real-time graphing and data capture. It supports all vendors and APIs, it doesn’t care what GPU brand you rock, it should work. It still retains command lines for power users.
With the new overlay, you can see real-time these metrics of your GPU. It includes “GPU Busy” as a new metric to capture. The overlay is also very configurable with options on sizing and location, as well as draw rate so you can dial in how much overhead the program takes up running.
Intel Arc Graphics Q3’23 Update Presentation
We are going to post the entire press presentation below for your reading pleasure. Be sure to check out the latest drivers for Intel Arc Graphics. Intel Arc & Iris Xe Graphics Driver version 31.0.101.4644 (WHQL Certified) was just released on 8/15/2023 and is the best currently for Intel Arc GPUs.
