Yeah! May! Use that capitalist marketing strategy to remind people of their childhood during the dumb parts of the year!
This started as a life update post, which people liked. But sort of evolved into its own monster of me purchasing a GPU. So read on if you want/care.
GPU DEATH!!!
Probably not the best time in computing history to get yourself a new GPU (Fuck you ChatGPT, Microsoft, and Facebook). But my PNY GeForce 1660 OC edition died. I was watching a video on it happily, and then the whole PC turned off. Total ground fault coming off the card itself because when I dropped my old GeForce 1050 Ti, it powered right back up again. Now, a lot of things could've resulted in the death of a card that we only had for about 4 years (Blog Entry to when we got it). Probably the most likely guess is that the giant heatsink we gave to it was just too much for a small board and may have warped the PCB to the point where the GPU dye got fucked. Also keep in mind this was an "OC-Editon" which, like our A380, is not necessarily good news as the manufacturer overclocked it, its life is further.
Intel Gunnir A770 arc get!
We'll admit. Weird choice! But lots of reasons on the WHY we got this card versus being a suck-up traditionalist with AMD or Nvidia.
- We already have an Intel A380 card. So, we kind of know what we're getting into the discrete graphics series. A380 was a shit gaming card (Intel did flash the firmware a few times and NOW it's acceptable performing around a 1060Ti), but for watching movies or working in any app that requires 3d like Blender or video editing. It was rock solid.
- When 3080's are pushing $600+ USD. This card was more in what we'd consider an acceptable price range of $280 USD. Yes, we're cheap-asses.
- We didn't go with the B-series Intel 5xx cards because they didn't offer as much VRAM. But it would technically clock faster than what we got, and it was again pushing $500+ USD. Again, we're cheap asses. We know!
- Performance-wise, A770 cards are approximately where a Nvidia 3060 should be. And we're going to stick behind 'approximately' because it really depends on what you are doing with this bad boy!
Now, Linus Tech Tips didn't really help my decision to get this card. In some ways, it slowed down my purchase because he was shilling -really- fucking hard for Intel! But price was the major factor for me. Probably why the A770's are as cheap as they are due to Best Buy really stocking up on these, and possibly the fact that these are pre-tariff pricing. As a result. I got myself a good card.
We were also reasonably okay with the power consumption of the A770. As if this card were running %100, it would go up to 200 watts of power usage. But during average OS and application use, it's hovering around 50 watts of power.
Windows/Ubuntu A770 action.
We actually like temporarily loading up Windows so that the A770 can be flashed to the latest revision, then go back to Ubuntu to use the card. Out of the box, ffmpeg didn't do AV1 hardware encoding until we followed Intel's instructions to get the required repository from Intel, going on OS, and then things immediately started working. Ubuntu does have its own flashing utility, but unsure if it's really being used by Intel at all. But one reason it's a good idea for Intel to flash your GPU is that compatibility with apps and games improves. At least that was always my experience with the A380.
The bad with Intel.
Classic lighting was enabled because the advanced lighting in Firestorm makes character rendering crazy dark!
For those who read my blog. We're on Second Life from time to time using the Phoenix Client. This metaverse engine is probably the worst possible choice to get an Intel Card for. In part because of the age of the client itself, spanning back to 2012, where they are still using an ancient OpenGL rendering engine. Historically, Intel has had issues with older games. And Second Life Phoenix Client is no exception.
As this old metaverse still has a significant amount of people using it to this very day (Something you won't hear from Twitch or YouTube, as Second Life is banned for not adhering to censorship policies for streaming), there may be a good chance that another Second Life client will come out with Vulkan support. It probably will not happen overnight. But as Linden Labs is trying to get standards more compliant, we're hoping a better engine will be on their TO-DO list.
On a quiet sim, I'm getting 80fps. But go to a club with 30+ people (Like GYC), and it drops to 12fps!. Painful!
On the other hand. As the arc can't really handle GL to its full potential. GPU usage typically hovers around 30-40 percent while in Second Life.
When it comes to old games on OpenGL, using only a portion of the card is perfectly fine. Like Quake 1-3, for example. Those games ran brilliantly on cards like the GeForce 3. With that in mind, you're hardly going to use the Intel card for these games.
We can't really speak much about other metaverse engines, as we do not have VR Chat, for example. Tower Unite is totally fine because it's using DirectX 11, with the frame limiter off, being outside was around 150+FPS, with indoors being around 90fps with occasional spikes to 60. By default, the frame limiter is set to 60. Which, once again. Isn't making the intel card work overly hard!
Going past 60fps in a metaverse is a little excessive. But that's just our opinion.
The good with Intel.
We went through most of the Adobe products with this card. Did some video rendering. Then over to the open source side and did some more video work. Then over to the blender for a bit to do some modeling. Even suck around in AutoCAD for work. From an application side, Intel has been flawless with handling general desktop applications that require 3d. This is why I recommend the A380 for the office when it was still $80. It just worked. Would I still recommend the A380 at its current price of $160... Man, I don't know. Might be better to get an older Quattro or something for the office computer.
Does it game?
This is our current Steam game library at the time of posting this. This is not all of my games, as we tend to go through GoG for a lot of things. Even though I'm not much of a fan of digital locker content after owning an Ouya. Games on Steam were the most accessible for testing my A770 card.
The clear winner is Amorous.
Okay, okay, we'll stop fucking with you. Although that is a fun game to keep idle to rack up game hours while your friends ask you if you're alright, like some kind of suicide patient.
The biggest jump in improvement moving to an A770 for us was Cyberpunk 2077. Because we get to turn on all of the rendering features, and the A770 hardly flinches at it all. But Cyberpunk was kind of a game we had since 1.0, where we played on a GeForce 1050 with potato graphics.
Risk of Rain 2 was another nice one to play, where it didn't drop below 100 FPS at all. Really dig that game because it reminds me of the cartoon series "Scavengers Reign," which, if you ever watch it, the animation can be rough at times. But the Sci-Fi story is great.
Finally, anything with an Unreal Engine, like Outer Worlds, did fantastic. No Man's Sky was great to play on this card as well.
But as you can see in my library. Clearly, we're not professional gamers, which is why you'll probably have to take our review of this card with a grain of salt! When it came to a lot of the older titles, we didn't notice significant improvement in performance. Probably due to frame limiting.
But as for the main reason why we purchased this card? Yes, we can blog perfectly fine with an A770. Thank you for asking.
The annoyance with this Intel card!
This would be especially diabolical if Gunnir were the same company as Gunnar, the blue-blocking gamer glasses company.
If we had one of those clear acrylic cases, we would think that having a blue glowy logo strobbing at me would piss me off after a while. We tried switching to Windows to download the utility to control that thing, and guess what? Doesn't work!. We would've probably gotten some gaffer's tape and covered that shit right up! But as everyone knows.. Sleeper cases are great because no matter how glowy or ugly a card may be. No one will see it unless we pop that side cover off to clean.
Final thoughts.
Not much to say, really. We got ourselves a nice graphics card that didn't level my bank account but also didn't set an entire rainforest on fire when we boot it up. It reinforces my decision to go with a sleeper case. Finally, it's crazy silent.
Now, in terms of bottlenecks, we think our monitor is probably the #1 bottleneck right now since it's just 60Hz (again, not gamers), so it'll probably be the next thing to upgrade on my list.
We hope you liked this mini-review of what we purchased and if you didn't. Wow. Sucks man.
That's what server said
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