Intel Confirms Performance Issues With Arc GPUs on Older Processors; Launches Investigation

Intel is now addressing the performance issues reported with Arc GPUs, especially when used with older CPUs, and they’ve begun investigating to identify and fix the problem.

Intel Addresses Arc GPU Performance Concerns with Older CPUs

At the launch, Intel’s Arc B580 and B570 GPUs seemed promising, but they didn’t dominate on performance charts despite offering more VRAM than the competition. A major reason for customers shying away from the Battlemage GPUs has been the underwhelming optimizations.

The issue isn’t just with the Intel GPU drivers; it’s a broader problem that kept the Arc Battlemage GPUs lagging behind competitors. Hardware Unboxed was quick to highlight this problem, noting the poor performance of the Arc B580 when paired with older CPUs, like those from the Ryzen 2000 series and 9th gen Intel Core processors.

For quite some time, Intel hadn’t acknowledged this issue. Finally, though, Intel has addressed it in their forums, releasing a statement that says:

"Thank you for your patience. We are aware of reports of performance sensitivity in some games when paired with older generation processors.
We have increased our platform coverage to include more configurations in our validation process, and we are continuing to investigate optimizations."

It appears Intel was aware of this issue all along but hadn’t prioritized optimizations until now. The company intends to broaden its performance optimizations, hinting that a fix is on the horizon, though exact timings remain unspecified.

While the hardware of Intel’s current GPUs is competitive with last-gen rivals, especially in recent titles, the underperformance with previous-gen Intel CPUs was unexpected. The Arc B580 and B570 show no such problems with the latest AMD and Intel CPUs.

There’s hope that new patches will help Intel compete more robustly with AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean Intel will immediately gain ground in the GPU market. The Arc Battlemage series is still hard to find, leading to Intel effectively stepping back from the current budget GPU competition.

News Source: Intel