Intel Boosts Arc DX11 Performance and Launches New PresentMon Tool
Intel Focuses on DirectX 11 Performance with Latest Driver Update
Arc graphics driver updates are so frequent that it has become a running bit on our podcast. In their Q3 briefing for media Intel talked about their commitment to gamers by pointing to the 30 Arc driver releases since launch, along with support for 57 games added with Game On drivers and the ever-growing list of XeSS-compatible games (70+).
But a huge metric for us enthusiasts is, naturally, the performance improvements that have been made via these frequent Arc driver updates; and while we have heard a lot about big gains from a rearchitected DX9 driver, Intel is now showcasing an average of a 19% performance uplift in DirectX 11 titles since launch.
As one would expect from a graphics marketing team with members like Tom Peterson and Ryan Shrout, frame times were discussed in their update presentation, and the overall smoothness of game performance was featured – not just average FPS numbers. Here Intel states that in addition to that 19% FPS uplift, DX11 games are 20% smoother since launch.
How the 99th percentile metric translates into a smoother in-game experience is better demonstrated with a frame time graph, such as the one Intel provided for Overwatch 2 at 1080p/Ultra:
It certainly appears that Intel is genuinely invested in the gaming experience from Arc graphics, and even if we might end up waiting a while for second-gen Arc (Battlemage) hardware, at least the commitment is there to continue to support – and improve – existing GPUs.
Intel PresentMon Beta Performance Analysis Tool
In addition to the DX11 uplift showcased in the presentation, Intel’s Tom Peterson walked us through Intel’s new PresentMon tool, which is an alternative to existing solutions such as CapframeX and NVIDIA’s FrameView. It is open source, and supports GPUs from all vendors, and offers a fully configurable overlay.
Bring your game performance to life through a fully customizable overlay with real-time performance charting that supports multi-line graphs and histograms. Now you can see real-time raw numbers, percentiles, rolling-window averages, and more to understand your gaming experience.
A major part of the PresentMon Beta presentation centered on the “GPU Busy” metric, and it looks like it will offer users an easy way to determine if they are CPU or GPU limited. I won’t attempt to explain the rendering pipeline (Tom did a great job, naturally), but it was very interesting to see this metric added to overlay/monitoring software that we can potentially add to our GPU reviews.
Innovative new “GPU Busy” metric shows real time CPU + GPU balance and how the resources in your machine are being utilized, allowing you to better evaluate computing bottlenecks in your games.
You can download the beta of Intel PresentMon from the page at game.intel.com (link), and while this is technically a beta – currently version 0.5 – it looks like a fully-featured product right out of the gate. We look forward to testing it.
