Intel Arc GPU the future of gaming?
The upcoming Intel Arc GPU will add another competitor to the GPU market, that is dominated by ATI and Nvidia GPU retailers. The problem is that Bitcoin miners are buying up all of the GPU cards that are for sale and the prices are kept very high, so I am interested in another GPU entry into the market. I hope that Linux drivers are a thing, this would be very important for the users who are running Linux. If the drivers were open-source, that would be even better, this would allow a driver to be built into the kernel and you would not require a binary blob as the Nvidia drivers do. Apparently, it will have a 32 core GPU chip. I wonder if many games like Arma 3 with its outdated engine will be able to take advantage of this GPU. That game has poor performance on modern high-specced hardware and needs a revamp to use modern hardware like multi-core CPUs effectively. I hope the new Enfusion engine is actually multicore by default. This would help performance dramatically. Better than what we have at the moment with a single core engine that has poor FPS in PVP.
But the Intel Arc GPU does have a lot of promise. I will wait for the benchmarks to see how well it performs with games, and to see if there are any Linux drivers at all. But since the integrated Intel chips are working on Linux, it should be fine. This could be a lower-cost option for a nice GPU solution for a Linux PC, that does not taint the kernel with binary drivers. So a win for everyone. As long as the performance is up to scratch, this is something I am really looking forward to. Imagine if 3dfx Interactive came back with a new GPU, that would be amazing. Yet another competitor in the GPU market, I heard a rumour this might happen, but I cannot remember where. But it was most likely a fake screenshot made with the Firefox dev console. It would be a great thing though, a new 3dfx card using OpenGL instead of Glide and able to run modern games well. I would be happier if there was more competition in the marketplace. Competition is never a bad thing in this modern world. Wait until Q1 2022 and we will know more about the exciting new hardware from Intel.