If you like this, watch our video discussion animation error and flaws of frametime testing as we know it today! kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ecWCgpuTr9XUaKM.html To further support our interviews and deep dives, consider grabbing our metal emblem pint glass! store.gamersnexus.net/products/gn-3d-emblem-glasses or our ultra comfortable hoodies! store.gamersnexus.net/products/warm-ultra-soft-fleece-zip-hoodie-tear-down NVIDIA latency technical discussion: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/fNBdqr2QsK3Ho5s.html Or our Intel Arc 2024 revisit: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/rZmHhtR9qsnNdas.html

Thanks Steve.

I wish all GPU vendors were more willing to talk about this kind of stuff. This is very interesting and informative stuff and I applaud Intel for willing to talk about this. Makes me want to pick up an Intel card just to tinker with it.

24:56 Thanks for watching Tom!

This is amazing. I work as a low level engineer in the reverse engineering field, and these technical deep dives are AMAZING. Its not an exaggeration to say that the engineering content you are putting out is legitimately one of the things people will be watching for years for knowledge of certain software topics. Thanks Steve & team, and you'll always have my support!

Former Mod developer here, working with source engine as 2d/3d artist. id like to share some basic views onto game optimizations. Petersen did a great job explaining deeper driver/engine Level optimizations, but this is only one part of it. Its not just the engine or driver, its also the assets, and this is also where some studios just drop the ball. you want to load a gpu evenly, but you can absolutely choke a gpu when overloading it with a heck of a lot of one single workload. that might be one specific shader, or absolutely insane geometry load, or stuffing the vram. 1. 3D models. models are basically a wireframe that form a body. the possible level detail of a model is determined by the number intersecting lines of the grid. patches formed by the grid are refered to as polygons (there are different types like ngons, quads, not gonna touch on that). a high polycount gives you a higher resolution mesh with potentially more detail, HOWEVER you can have a model with millions of polygons with no details at all. the polycount is direct geometry load on the gpu. the higher the polycount in the scene, the higher the load on the gpu. once you overload the geometry pipeline with absolutely insane levels of geometry, the gpu performance drops off a cliff. this is basically what tessellation does - it takes a simple wireframe and bloats the polycount, increasing mesh fidelity, but blasting the gpu with geometry load. this was nvidias big trick to choke radeon gpus in certain games using gameworks or hairworks. nvidia massively increased the geometry capability of their gpus starting with fermi, and tried to get studios to use their tessellation libraries found in gameworks/hairworks that would absolutely obliterate radeon gpus with stupid high amounts of geometry load. notable games are the witcher 3 with hairworks and crysis 2 with environment tessellation that does absolutely nothing except cutting radeon framerates in half - this is why you can find the tessellation factor option in the radeon and intel arc driver, it limits the mesh complexity scaling of tessellation. geometry load is the whole visible scene with all models and map geometry on the screen. so you want to keep the polycount of the rendered scene as low as possible, and you absolutely want to avoid wasting polygons on geometry that doesnt even need it. a cube can be done with a "single digit" number of polygons, or 2.000.000.000.000 without any visible difference. you can have thousands of the minimal polygon cubes on screen without breaking a sweat, while just a few of the bloated cube will make your gpu scream. modern gpus can handle a ton of geometry load, but this is not an excuse to just waste it. having a ton of unnecessary polycount puts unnecessary load on the gpu, and is a result of lazy mesh optimization. sure, you want higher fidelity models for better visuals, but you can assume that studios rather cut on time per model in exchange for worse client side performance. one technique, usually used in older games, is "backface culling", which basically deletes all parts of the model that the player is never seeing, cutting geometry load. there are possible artifacts when you can actually see the deleted backface, and the model looks hollow. today this is not done alot because gpus are pretty powerful, but there are situations where this should still be done but isnt. but dont worry, polycount isnt the only way to have detailed models, theres a way to simulate polycount with textures, thats why we will switch over to... 2. textures: textures in games have 3 main usecases. 1. give color and texture to a 3d model and to the map/environment, 2. decals and sprites, and 3. control shaders. like you already heard textures are relatively easy on the gpu, HOWEVER, this is not entirely true across the board. the taxing factor of textures is resolution, file size and function - hitting the Vram and the shader pipeline. resolution gives better clarity, but bloats filesize and you can combat filesize with compression. you wanna set a texture resolution that makes sense. high resolution textures that the player is viewing up close, low resolution where it doesnt matter so much, also use compression where possible. this applies for the albedo map, or diffuse map, which is basically the texture that gives you the color information. there are other textures that control shaders, like bump and normal maps, specular maps, phong shader maps, self illumination maps, parallax maps. these textures tell the engine what to do with which part of the texture. these can be greyscale or include different informations on each of the R G B channels, like a normal map (this is a very fancy bumpmap with accurate "3d" information baked into 2d space. normal maps are either hand made (legacy) or more commonly "baked" in a 3d application from a high resolution version of a 3d model to reduce geometry load by using a low poly model + normal map instead of a model thats 100-1000 times the polycount). so you can use a 2d texture to reintroduce "3d" details back onto a low poly model. the normal map acts somewhat like a textured rubber glove you pull over your hand. normal maps should not be lossy compressed, because it will introduce awful blocky artifacts when light hits the object, and normal maps usually also have an alpha channel (greyscale channel next to the RGB channels) with a different function, usually controlling a different shader, like specularity, which makes the normal map a chonker in file size. you dont wanna overdo normal map resolution, as it will eat vram for breakfast and very high resolution normal maps also put more load on the shader pipeline. a gpu can withstand a considerable amount of normal maps, but you can obviously overdo it. lets briefly talk about how you map texture space to models. in the 3d modeling software you "unwrap" or "uv map" the model into 2d space. imagine taking a roll of toilet paper and cutting it across the long side, now you can put it flat on the table and when youre done painting, you can put it back into a roll shape. its basically the same with 3d models, but theres a twist. with the toilet roll you have a 1:1 representation of the model and the texture, but with 3d models you set a texture size (for example 2048x1024) and then you place and scale parts of the model onto it. the bigger the parts on the uvmap, the more pixel space they get, hence higher resolution. now comes the kicker: to preserve texture size you map important parts big and unimportant parts, that are barely visible, but can still be seen, small. take a gun, for example - you want the regions close to the camera to be as high resolution as possible, but you also have tons of parts that just need color, but arent usually seen, or just are plain black that can be smaller. you can also use mirroring to cut uv map area in half for some parts. by not properly scaling the parts of the uv map you can end up with a very unoptimized uv map that gives you worse resolution to important parts while being twice the size. the impact of one bad texture set for one model isnt big, but consider a scene sometimes containing hundreds or thousands of assets. it adds up.

Can't wait for ARC Battlemage!

I'm a simple man. I see Tom Peterson in a GN video, and I watch the entire thing sitting forward in my chair with both index fingers pressed against my lips, brow furrowed, learning intently. Love this series. Never stop. There's no such thing as too much Tom on GN's video catalogue.

I honestly just love this miniseries. Im currently studying to become a software engineer and watching your videos makes the learning process very interesting and fun. Thanks to you and Tom for bringing us these videos and I hope we'll see more of them !

This graphics miniseries with TAP is great. Excellent explanations and presentation, and Steve is following up with all the right questions.

Great video and explainer! As someone who bought an Arc A770 last year and has seen huge improvements in its drivers; it gives me great confidence seeing Toms passion and drive for Intel GPUS and that the future of intel graphics can only be getting better with the likes of professionals like him in Intel. 👍

12:38 All that's happening per frame. PER FRAME, silicon + electrons = magic.

I noticed something Steve said "I didn't feel confident in my understanding to....". THIS is what separates GN from most other channels and I'm not talking about only PC hardware, just technology in general. A lot of others will just do some half a$$ed job of compiling information and present it without a clue about what they're talking about. Steve doesn't treat us like that. Massive respect.

This made me realize the genius work from Valve on DXVK, the amount of work it needed to be seamless to the games is outstanding. Thank you Steve for the amazing interview.

21:40 That's some subtle shade thrown right there. Nice.

What I love about GN is that they respect their audience intelligence and have the guts to dive into more complex subjects such as this one. Thank you, Steve! This stuff is trully fascinating.

This was a great video! Thanks for having Tom on GN. I learned quite a bit in this one. On a separate note, I got an A770 from someone who gave up on Intel early. I let it sit in the box for 6-9 months and it aged like fine wine. It's really cool to see the performance getting unlocked by the hardworking people at Intel.

This was fantastic, and seeing how invested the Arc team is has me very excited for Battlemage

I can only repeat: Incredible respect for Intel in working on this stuff even after the initial failure and issues. I hope the current financial losses dont stop you guys from keeping it up and coming with nee Hardware at some point. I will buy it, no matter what. yYou guys worked hard to convince you dont just give up, and you will have earned that money!

Since the first time I saw Tap in a video I thought he should be the face of Intel. No marketing veil, just honest and open descriptions of the inner workings of a GPU. He genuinely wants you to understand what a GPU is and what it does like you would expect from a teacher. I mean, of course his appearance on certain channels is intended as some level of marketing, but it's not full of the normal bullshit where they ridiculously exaggerate everything about what they're selling. When he appeared on PCWorld I asked in the Q&A how Arc performed in VR and he straight up said "Do not buy Arc for VR." You would _NEVER_ see that from an AMD or Nvidia rep, and you gotta respect when he shows you respect with a blunt honest answer like that.

I was talking to a friend about drivers and how they work not too long ago, but couldn't really convey the finer details (not that I knew them to this extent anyway). This video explains it so well in "normal people speak". I really enjoy the way these video's and difficult topics are framed and laid out for everyone to understand. Awesome reporing! Edit: I really appreciate that Intel is fixed on letting people know what they are doing with Arc and really making a solid attempt at the GPU market. More competition = better and with AMD and NVIDIA so focussed on AI now, barely noticing their "ol' reliable" gamer market, we need someone to keep their attention invested there, before they get their marketshare snatsched away long term.

I love these engineering insights. Keep it up Steve and thanks!

Great! More intel arc news on GN always excited when I see the notification.

My brain hurts from this, but I have a better understanding and appreciate how much goes into driver optimizations. Hats off to Tom.

This was one of the most fascinating deep dies I've watched in quite a while. Tom is an excellent presenter and does a great job of taking really complex stuff and making an understandable.

Just finished watching the video from earlier in the week. Perfect time to jump into this one. *THANKS STEVE!*

This video helps me a lot as a hardware person. I don’t do much on the software side. I think I know what it’s doing (educated guessing) but it’s nice to have an explainer of what it’s actually doing.

Are we going to get a discussion about MESA support?

Always love seeing some Arc content. Thanks Steve and Tom for these types of videos

It's refreshing to see someone honestly talk about their products, as long as Intel offer their GPU I won't be going back to the other two.

I was basically the "they're the same image" meme when that before and after slide came up, I was puzzled until it was zoomed in haha. Honestly, I got lost pretty early (I understand nothing about these things and goodness knows a scientific/analytic mind is not one of my strong points) but even with my limited understanding, it was really interesting. Another example of "yeah just optimise it" when the work behind it is truly daunting. Thanks for the interview Steve. Speaking of optimisation, do you think you could have a game developer on and ask them why a game collection that was 3gb was turned into one that's dozens of gbs heavier and doesn't even work properly? :p it might not be as technical as this but goodness knows I'd like to understand why game devs have decided compression and optimisation aren't necessary, maybe there's a graph for that too. Cheers!

I was *VERY* close to buying an ARC card for my new system build, and Intel letting their engineers participate in videos of this quality and detail increases the likelihood that my next GPU ends up being one of theirs (given reasonable performance, power consumption and driver quality). This is really, really good PR, and it's very interesting to watch. Thanks for covering both technical and business/process aspects, and for not dumbing things down. Kudos to both Steve for facilitating a conversation where he's sometimes slightly out of his depth (but still asks relevant questions!), and to Tom for very good explanations of pretty technical topics.

This series is good. Very informative and Mr Intel is a natural teacher. Thanks Steve

I love these sorts of dives, it might not ever make us experts in the field, but it gives you a good sense of just how complex all this stuff is, this in turns allows you to get a better perspective on things.

As a game developer myself, I really love to see these conversations, it's not every day I have the opportunity to hear from hardware engineers every day! I do feel it's important to specify one thing I think wasn't super clear: just as every car uses an engine of some sort, same goes for games. The engine is the library that provides programmers like me with the tools we need to run the game in the first place. What Tom meant by "a lot of games use an engine" is "a lot of games use *publicly available* engines" (that's your Unreal and Unity and such). It's worth noting that a lot of game studios build their own if they have the resources to do so, there are quite a few advantages to this approach.

Saw the notification. Clicked it. Liked it.

it really goes to show how well AMD and nvidia have done given just how complex all this is, and intel is trying to get into it and having to do it from pretty much scratch.

As someone who knows just enough about this stuff to understand what TAP is saying at a surface level, this is possibly one of GN's best videos. The average gamer probably won't understand much of this and that's OK, but as a software engineering student and GPU nerd, this is so cool.

I love these in depth tech talkes. Tom does such a fantastic job explaining and even is kind enough to bring slides. Cant wait to see more!

Love seeing Tom on camera, he always has something new and interesting to say. I do have a follow up question for when something is the driver teams responsibility to improve or the application teams responsibilty. Would it not be a more efficient use of your time to identify the reasons people are getting poor performance i.e. Tom's example of register spilling, and writing tools and documentation that tells app developers "Hey, you're doing this wrong". So that over time more people write better performing code, rather than relying on the driver team to fix that issue for you

I LOVE this kind of in-depth and well informed break down of complex concepts like this. Ty to everyone involved.

Thanks for the Selfie in Asia Steve.

Man, this is the kind of content youtube was made for. Outstanding and interesting work here, from both Steve and Tom !

As a QA engineer, I have gotten very close to all these various layers of the pipeline. I am glad for the deep dive into it. Make all this stuff common sense.

Props to the Intel guys who went out of their way to make these slides, and Tom for going over them in detail. As an engineer, it can be annoying to put technical work aside to create diagrams and presentations, but they really went out of their way to make sure this looks great and serves as efficient documentation as well. Thanks, Intel & Tom, and thanks, Steve!

What a amazingly informative video. Tom does a great job of breaking down very complicated topics and Steve is asking all the right questions.

I may or may not currently work for the big blue silicon corp, but having someone like Tom on the GPU team is essential. When Raja Koduri left, ARC's future felt way less certain, but I think these types of improvements and attention in the gaming space translate to improvements in the AI compute space, so upper management sees the financial appeal of getting their hands dirty in the gaming space too. I'm actually stoked for the continued improvement to Alchemist and the release of Battlemage.

I love Intel's effort and involvement with the PC market to develop and improve their product. I purchased an A770 despite it not being faster than my current gpus. What I do love about it is all the tweaking I go to help improve performance. I especially love it when after doing a combination of tweaks, I get game performance that rivals their competitor or completely blows my mind and not expecting ARC to perform that well. I also encounter some games that runs terrible. I run some tweaks and at times it improves a little. Some times there no improvements at all. All I can do is just wait for better drivers to come out or an update from the game devs. With ARC I feel that I am part of the development of the product. The product grows on me with every day that passes by. Going with ARC and expecting things to work flawlessly... is a you problem. Intel advised the gaming community day one. I cannot wait for ARC to get better. I've been an Nvidia and AMD once in a while PC gamer. I can so see myself going ARC 2 next time around. Even if they still have a ways to go in catching Nvidia. Fantastic work Intel. Bravo.

This is the kind of content I love. Technical but so well explained and presented that it’s easy to follow and I learn new stuff. This is the best kind of content on KZfaq. The best.

Kudos to GN for refraining from judging if game is "optimized", because it's a difficult things to analyze without knowing internal details of the game and it's a term often misunderstood by gamers and even experts misinterpreted it. I remember Digital Foundry guys, who are usually very knowledgeable, criticizing a completely empty open world UE5 demo for not utilizing all CPU cores and comparing it to Cyberpunk - with tons of NPCs and various simulations and systems running in the background. That UE5 demo literally had nothing to run on other cores, because there was nothing except graphics and one player entity, so even if their conclusion about the engine was correct, the example used was not and could not be used for this kind of comparison. It was bizarre to see this kind of cluelessness from some of the best "game optimization" nerds in the media.

Please more videos like these, they are genuinely enjoyable and informative!

Thoroughly enjoying this series so far, great in depth look at what's going on behind the scenes (frames?). Looking forward to the third part, and hopefully more deep dives such like this and the dive into system latency with the nVidia rep. Great stuff!

Excelent video, thank you for giving the opportunitiy to have a general idea on how is established the relationship between software and hardware in termes of video games and gpu. thank you so much to both of you and your team.

i love that intel is working so hard at this.... its so great to see. my next budget build i think id be in a place to go intel now.

Videos like this are precisely why I'm a subscriber. Can't wait to see more!

I have been a gamer almost from the very beginning of gaming back on DOS, have very little understanding of how things actually work these days but i still love listening to people like this.

Fantastic video. Makes you realize and have a level of respect on the amount of research is needed to compete.

I personally have actually said "this game is optimised!" about the initial release of Overwatch (2016). For how good it looked it really was pretty damn well optimised and still looked pretty great even on lower settings on very old hardware while still delivering good or even great FPS. I guess the only area where it lost some points from me was it used to have some very odd random CTDs for no apparent reason.

Thank you for this....the compiling shaders thing has always puzzled me as while it had existed before, nowdays it is everywhere...i just wish it was done behind the scenes rather than a bar when starting up the game lol

I saw someone wishing "good luck" at 23:22 but none was needed. You two nailed it.

Great video guys. Very Informative! Keep them coming!!! 🔥🔥🔥

Great video. My two only remaining questions are when Battlemage is coming and if the drivers will make it shine 😂 (jk jk) But seriously I so want to buy Intel GPU since prices are great but I’m still discouraged by the prevalent issues and I don’t want to risk the next big field of stars game won’t work on launch.

So, if I get this right the drivers are "driving" the cards. Those DLLs and Kernels seems to be the instructions on how to handle the "road". It's almost as if you had to learn to drive a new car in a new city for every new game. But every time you come into a new city; I need to learn to drive differently. Not only because of the car but also because of the roads, signs, rules, temperature and terrain... Sometimes it's not too different from one city to another, but other times it's completely wild. What could be the safest maneuver in one city could lead to your death in another one.

This is incredible! I’ve been using an A750 since launch and look forward to the future hardware. Really appreciate the hard work employees have put into improving the performance. It’s super cool to see behind the scenes of what makes them tick.

This was amazing, Tom was able to explain really complex topics for the average user to understand. Makes me appropriate all the work the Arc team is doing. Thanks Tom!

Tom Petersen is amazing. I follow him since he was at Nvidia and he did a review about one of my first gpus, the gtx 650ti. His great commentary about products and software mixed with silly jokes here and there makes him the perfect man for the job lol

I bought a laptop with an Intel A370M GPU. This was over a year and a half ago, I still experience crashes on Photoshop that halt the entire system to this day and cannot for the life of me reach out to anyone to diagnose the issue...

Alway senjoy the videos with Tom. The details at times are well beyond what I understand, but that's just more fuel for google searches. I've had an A750 for a couple months now and been pretty pleased with it's performance on my old DX9 based titles. Fantastic deep dive into drivers!

Love the "deeper dives" here! great stuff!

Thanks for your continued coverage of Arc! On your most recent are video you talked about MSAA being broken for Arc in GTA and how the Intel team responded and said it was a GTA exclusive issue. Please tell the team this isn’t exclusive to GTA, in some older games like Watch Dogs 1 and Assassin’s Creed Black Flag MSAA is completely broken on Arc!

these videos with tom are great!

I love these series, I didn't know there were more coming up after last one. Definitely enjoying Toms in-depth knowledge here. Thanks for sharing!

this is absolutely fantastic, I seriously love chats like this, it's what has been sorely missing in the relationship between product and consumer. Talking to the people who actually *make* the damn thing makes me feel indescribably more informed and appreciative of everything.

just got a770 recently .. this is interesting

Great video! Thanks Steve and the team! Great explanation from Tom 🤙

Love these videos with Tom. Very much looking forward to the video encode/decode video - I've been contemplating picking up an LGA1700 CPU predominately for Intel QSV (specifically the dual encoders on their UHD 770 iGPU) to use in a media server.

Please grill him on his companys DX3\5\7 OGL1.x\2.x emulation\wrapping. They never want to talk about it.

Tom Peterson seems like such a nice guy :)

I bought ARC .. and I like ARC. Thank you Tom for continually improving this product.

Super cool video, I love hearing this guy talk about these really technical challenges.

Really thinking of ARC for next card. This community out reach makes it feel less like a corporation

5:50, just to add; not all shaders are text when they land in driver land. For DirectX12 and Vulkan, they have already compiled the text to an intermediary binary format (DXIL or SPIRV) which is easier for the driver to handle since there's less steps required to convert it to their instructions. But still it needs that compilation step. Probably text is easier to explain though (and relevant to opengl)

Thanks for getting this out when other major places for whatever reason hasn't been able to get this kind of talk out of a company. Also kudos to Steve for being hesitant to say a game is "unoptimized"; his reasoning is the best approach to this. The problem I have with people saying something is "unoptimized" is there's no empirical way to test this. To even start, you need performance requirements and even then, those performance requirements can be subject to opinion. Just because you demand the game be able to run 120 FPS average at 1080p on maximum details on a RTX 4060 or RX 7700 doesn't mean the next person will; they may demand 30 FPS, 60 FPS, or 240FPS. If I want to be that guy and demand 4K, 240 FPS, maximum quality on an RTX 4060 8GB, then every game except maybe things from before 2010 is unoptimized. This is just scratching the surface, but ultimately, without data and requirements, there's really nothing to go off of. I even asked someone what an "optimized" game means, and they just gave me a generic answer. If you don't even know what to look for specifically, then what even makes you qualified to make the call that something is "optimized" vs. not?

Another GN x TAP video so quickly?! Thanks Steve! PS. It would be wonderful if you took us behind the scenes at the Intel graphics dev lab office

Doom Eternal was OPTIMIZED. (🙏 Thank you ID).

These are great videos! Even though I may not understand everything that is being said, it at least shows us that not only are the companies doing as much as they can, but they're showing it with someone who at least understands them to ask questions and confirm what they're being told, to a degree of course. It's also great when you have someone like Tom who is enthusiastic about the work he and his teams do!

Incredible video! I learned a lot. Thank you for the hard work Steve and team, and thank you Tom for the in depth explanations!

The fact that Tom is still doing this stuff (and Intel is letting him) makes me think they still have a long-term plan to _eventually_ get there with their graphics division. I truly believe if Intel holds out a bit and doesn't kill Arc too fast, they can carve out a chunk of the market by focusing on price/perf gamers. From that starting position, it can grow further. Nvidia needs a kick in the pants and to lose sales to snap back to reality.

Hi, im tech lead for one of those games which was optimized in the intel driver lately. I would have question for Intel guy, is there any way to find out what did you optimize for our game? Maybe we could do more stuff on our side to make the game run faster.

Super interesting. Thank you for taking the time for this content.

Great review! I learned a lot of this stuff in my undergrad computer science courses. This guy can take difficult concepts and explain them in a simplified fashion.

I do wonder how much the game engine matters, for example is UT4 more optimised than UT5 purely because it has been around longer and more mature. I hear so much about games being ported from 4 to 5 and i wonder does the performance take a hit just by doing that

Wish you had asked him this critical question: "what was the point of 2 alpha releases with DG1 and DG2, as well as over a decade of integrated graphics drivers? Why were the drivers not ready when you had 2 years to get them ready before arc launched if we only count DG1 and DG2, and why was all the integrated driver work useless for ARC?"

I always love these videos, Tom giving us info about arc I am very excited for Arc and hope to see Paladin arctype.

Great stuff thanks Steve. I’ve just ordered parts for a new system which started out being very price focused - I picked up a Ryzen 3600 for £57 and an Acer Predator A770 for £232 to go in an also secondhand Fractal Design Pop Air Mini case - until I ended up buying a 5950X after reading about ReBar… Anyway, really glad to see Intel’s drivers coming on leaps and bounds and really hoping my new build will perform well (perhaps increasingly so) when everything arrives!

How about fixing AMD's garbage drivers?

Daym, is this a nice video! Listening to Tom Peterson talking is quite amazing. So knowledgeable and so helpful! Really liked the video editing as well - some great zoom-ins and overlays😄 Questions for next time: Tom, where is the area of focus for driver/software improvements now (and next) I am not only talking gaming here.

That was amazing in different levels. Thank you all for discussing this.

I loved this series. I left this series with so much knowledge about GPU image processing , render times, optimizations. amazing . thanks a lot steve and tom 🥰. Will wait for more exciting stuff like this

Bought my 8 gb A750 LE card in January for 200 USD new. So far no issues with my use cases. Awesome looking card !