Gamers Nexus took the time to make a video about just the driver problems (see above). In summary, the game drivers are sort-of alright: most newish games load and play fine. But the driver installer is so problematic that it borders on being malware, and when the Arc Command app decides not to crash, its settings toggles and overclocking utilities barely work at all. Partly in response, the VP and general manager of the Visual Computing Group at Intel, Lisa Pearce, penned a blog post discussing some common concerns about the Arc series last week. She talks first about the minor problems with DX11 and DX9 and then reiterates the importance of enabling Resizable Bar on Arc GPUs before addressing the elephant in the room.
Intel’s question: I’ve read reviews that say Intel’s driver is not ready yet. What’s the status? Pearce continues, but I’d like to pause here to reiterate that the A380 hasn’t launched outside of China yet. None of the reviews, including our own, were conducted through any sort of review program. Instead, reviewers have had to purchase their A380 samples from China and have them shipped. It sounds like Intel is listening to reviewers and reflecting on their feedback, which is a pleasant change. However, I find it hard to believe that Intel wasn’t already aware of most of the issues pointed out by Gamers Nexus. They were simply too glaring and if they were as trivial to fix as Pearce claims, then they should have been fixed before the software left beta. At least some of them are fixed now… We are continuing to learn what it will take for us to be successful. Some of the issues were related to our installer and how it downloaded unique components after initial installation. This allows us to have a smaller initial download to get users started quicker. But unexpected failures are causing that process to be unreliable, and later this year we will be moving to a combined package that is downloaded and installed all at once. No more installer issues."
