Intel ARC GPU's vs SL?

[Mellie Sassypants]

Hello everyone,

 

I was wondering if anyone tried testing out Second Life on the new ARC dedicated gpu's.

Genuinely curious to see if it preforms somewhat decently.

 

Thank you kindly!

[Modulated]

47 minutes ago, Mellie Sassypants said:

Hello everyone,

 

I was wondering if anyone tried testing out Second Life on the new ARC dedicated gpu's.

Genuinely curious to see if it preforms somewhat decently.

 

Thank you kindly!

I watched a couple videos on these new cards not long ago..while technically they should work, there are some caveats.  These cards are designed for much newer hardware and utilize pcie4 and smart access memory/resizable BAR in bios to squeeze the performance out of them, so I can imagine dropping it into an older system without those features and it not running well at all.  Most comments seem to be that the ARC line is intended more for content creators than for gaming, but that could change as everything does.

[Mike Weiz]

Yeah you need a fairly new system (10th gen intel or higher) that supports resizeable BAR for the card to work right. With that being said it's supposed to be on par with an RTX-3060. I'm tempted to get one for that 16GB of VRAM and see how it behaves.

[MarissaOrloff]

Don't buy an ARC GPU. They are seen as being absolutely horrendous across all review channels. So unless you have money to burn and just want to play with something new because you're bored don't buy it. Maybe their 2nd or 3rd gen will be better but for now they fall into Yugo territory.

 

Edited October 31, 2022 by MarissaOrloff

[gwynchisholm]

Old thread but this is the first thing that comes up when you google anything about this so i figured id post here so others find it as well.

SL on Arc runs about as well as youd expect its tier of GPU to run on OpenGL, specs:

 

Using a fairly detailed but not super complex place as an example with no other users, since regardless of what hardware you have, other users will kill performance

Completely maxed settings on the most recent version of firestorm, in 4k, with the exception of render distance being sub 200m is how i usually play, or 64/32m when indoors. Note that imgur compresses these images.

With shadows:

Without shadows:

33fps with shadows, nearly 60fps without shadows

The limitation is less the gpu and more the CPU, still, even with an 11900k its just not utilizing hardware very well so the CPU bound lighting tech is having a bad time despite whatever hardware you have.

And besides the weird way SL reports the video memory on cards with resizable bar enabled, it works fine, no crashes no sutter. I would still recommend something like an RTX 3060ti or Radeon 6700XT for this kind of performance since those cards will just do better overall for everything outside of secondlife. Intel ARC plays extremely well with DX12 and Vulkan titles, and punches above its weight, 16gb of video memory only helps that further. However for OpenGL youre not seeing anything special. And for DirectX 11 or older titles you see some pretty heavy limitations really quick that the tech just isnt designed for.

From my experience with secondlife and a large variety of hardware from the actual bare minimum to even be present in game with something like Radegast, to current gen high end, the limitation is no longer hardware at all, its the games use of it. I have an i5 12400F based system with a GTX 1080 that also plays SL in 4k at max settings and its nearly identical, beacuse the framerate problems come with having a billion avatars on screen and shadows.

Turn on impostor avatars and turn off shadows and you can triple framerate on basically any hardware. You can still comfortably play SL on later Core2Quads at pretty high resolutions.

I have an Arc A380 as well if anyone wants to see that, but i dont have an A750, id be happy to test out more hardware or show off results from different locations.

 

[JeromFranzic]

19 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

Old thread but this is the first thing that comes up when you google anything about this so i figured id post here so others find it as well.

SL on Arc runs about as well as youd expect its tier of GPU to run on OpenGL, specs:

 

Using a fairly detailed but not super complex place as an example with no other users, since regardless of what hardware you have, other users will kill performance

Completely maxed settings on the most recent version of firestorm, in 4k, with the exception of render distance being sub 200m is how i usually play, or 64/32m when indoors. Note that imgur compresses these images.

With shadows:

Without shadows:

33fps with shadows, nearly 60fps without shadows

The limitation is less the gpu and more the CPU, still, even with an 11900k its just not utilizing hardware very well so the CPU bound lighting tech is having a bad time despite whatever hardware you have.

And besides the weird way SL reports the video memory on cards with resizable bar enabled, it works fine, no crashes no sutter. I would still recommend something like an RTX 3060ti or Radeon 6700XT for this kind of performance since those cards will just do better overall for everything outside of secondlife. Intel ARC plays extremely well with DX12 and Vulkan titles, and punches above its weight, 16gb of video memory only helps that further. However for OpenGL youre not seeing anything special. And for DirectX 11 or older titles you see some pretty heavy limitations really quick that the tech just isnt designed for.

From my experience with secondlife and a large variety of hardware from the actual bare minimum to even be present in game with something like Radegast, to current gen high end, the limitation is no longer hardware at all, its the games use of it. I have an i5 12400F based system with a GTX 1080 that also plays SL in 4k at max settings and its nearly identical, beacuse the framerate problems come with having a billion avatars on screen and shadows.

Turn on impostor avatars and turn off shadows and you can triple framerate on basically any hardware. You can still comfortably play SL on later Core2Quads at pretty high resolutions.

I have an Arc A380 as well if anyone wants to see that, but i dont have an A750, id be happy to test out more hardware or show off results from different locations.

 

Wow, thanks for the explanation! Yeah, I guess I'd wait for a 2nd or 3rd gen version but this is nice to see for a Intel dGPU. 

I usually go with ugly 1.0 shadows and 6-8 impostors rendered on my now ancient i7 8th gen/GTX 1050 lappy. Still helps to have 4 GB VRAM to hold off on high texture loads somewhat but unless it's crowded or the area I'm on is massively detailed/huge (or both), the ugly shadows usually stay on.

I do use better shadow detail sometimes, but that's for photos, and Black Dragon still works fine for me. 

As far as OS, doesn't really matter if it's Windows 10/11 or some optimized Linux install but for me, Linux usually fares slightly better on my PC due to less OS overhead.