I was really hoping to see more competition in the dGPU space. But considering Intel’s overall troubles and the challenges with gaming dGPUs (even AMD can’t come anywhere close to Nvidia in the gaming dGPU space) this is to be expected.
I wonder how many of ARC’s issues were a result of Windows, since I’ve been using an ARC a750 for about a year now on Linux and it has been really solid, better than the 2060 I had before. The only compute I use the card for is in Blender and it works really well for that.
To add on, Windows needs support for all the directX versions on top of vulkan and OpenGl, when Linux only needs vulkan and OpenGl working.
I believe many of major the drivers issues were sorted out after releases. Although I doubt support is anywhere close to being as good as AMD, let alone Nvidia.
I tried to run Windows with ARC earlier this year and the driver updater would shit istelf and refuse to update the drivers, requiring a full reinstall. Some of the software I wanted to use just straight up did not work (Steam link, ALVR, Minecraft with the Vivecraft mod) and Half Life: ALyx had some annoying graphical issues. It was pretty performant though so ARC is still a good option when every penny counts.
Intel ARC GPUs are actually very good. They just tried being a little too based by saying fuck you to HDMI and DirectX, both market leaders. They only support DP (HDMI is actually converted to DP in ARC GPUs), and only cared to properly implement Vulkan drivers.
