Intel has taken enormous pains to prevent a repeat of the driver woes that plagued its first-generation “Alchemist” GPUs inside its second-generation “Battlemage” cards, Intel fellow Tom Petersen told The Full Nerd podcast on Tuesday morning.
“It’s a complex problem, but we have invested gi-namic resources into addressing it,” Petersen, also known as “TAP,” told The Full Nerd crew, hosted by PCWorld regulars, as Intel launched the Intel “Battlemage” or B580 cards. “It’s like enormous, and gigantic.”
The story Intel’s first A770 and A750 cards were expected to tell was one of a literal third-party competitor whose presence would force down the prices of graphics cards at a time where AMD and especially Nvidia were pushing them higher and higher. But the launch of Arc arrived a year later than expected, and the A770 and A750 followed the debut of the A380 in China that was accompanied by awful software glitches. Our A770/A750 review was also affected by several software issues, even if some weren’t necessarily deal breakers.
Still, when PCWorld ends up writing a story titled “Are Intel Arc GPUs still buggy?” several months later, you know there were substantive problems.
Our followup article showed how the driver experience improved, however, and Petersen said that Intel’s ongoing driver stack continues that trend.
“Think of it as we’ve done more than 50 driver releases since we launched Alchemist,” Petersen said Tuesday. “That’s 50. And those driver releases have all gone through massive [quality assurance] cycles.”
“We’ve increased our game coverage by 2.5X — so, you know, hundreds and hundreds of games are run every week looking for validation regressions,” Petersen added. “So it’s only through testing and architecture and hard work that we can get our driver quality where it needs to be. But I feel very comfortable that we are over that hump.”
Petersen said that he expects “hundreds of thousands” of people to buy the Battlemage cards.
“This is really going to be either earth-shattering for me as we get out, and there’s like hundreds of millions, or hundreds of thousands of people that buy this card, and I’m going to be delighted when they say this is rock solid, or it’s just going to shatter me… I don’t expect the second one, it’s a nice thing.”
Not the striongest endorsement, maybe. But with Intel’s market share in the discrete graphics market essentially at zero, it has nowhere to go but up.