Intel’s Arc A750 and A770 GPUs have been lastly launched earlier this month after years of teases, bulletins, and delays, and the tip result’s a pair of GPUs that typically supply respectable efficiency for the value. However Intel’s first true gaming-focused devoted GPU structure has additionally had a number of first-generation jitters, together with glitchy drivers and efficiency points in video games that do not use trendy DirectX 12 or Vulkan graphics APIs.

One other early concern could also be idle power consumption—the quantity of power these GPUs eat once they aren’t being actively used or once they’re solely rendering your desktop. Intel printed a troubleshooting article late final week that acknowledged that Arc desktop GPUs may undergo from “high idle power consumption,” together with steps for remediating the difficulty.

Customers might want to go into their PC’s BIOS and configure a pair of superior PCI Specific power administration settings—the “Native ASPM” (or Lively State Power Administration) setting ought to be enabled, and the “PCI Specific root port ASPM” setting ought to be enabled and set to “L1 Substates.” You will additionally have to set the PCI Specific Hyperlink State Power Administration setting to “most power financial savings” in Home windows’ superior power choices settings.

Intel acknowledges that the settings will likely be discovered in totally different locations in totally different BIOSes and that they might be named various things.

Testing from Tom’s {Hardware} reveals that with the settings enabled, Arc A750 power consumption at idle dropped from 37.3 W to fifteen.5 W, a big drop. The identical settings did not appear to affect an Arc A770 card, although it is unclear whether or not it is a motherboard bug, a GPU {hardware} or firmware or driver downside, or one thing else.

Intel might be able to tackle the difficulty in the long-term with driver or firmware updates for the Arc A-series GPUs, however the troubleshooting article does not make it sound very seemingly. Intel says that the corporate “will likely be making optimizations in future generations,” which makes it sound like we’ll want new {hardware} to deal with the difficulty decisively.

This is not the primary BIOS-related change Intel has requested Arc customers to make. The playing cards’ efficiency additionally suffers considerably when a function referred to as Resizable BAR (or ReBAR, or Sensible Entry Reminiscence, or SAM) is disabled in your BIOS. Nvidia and AMD playing cards may also profit when Resizable BAR is enabled—it permits your processor to deal with your GPU’s reminiscence all of sudden as an alternative of in 256MB chunks—however the efficiency affect by some means is significantly smaller.

What the idle power consumption fix and the Resizable BAR points have in frequent is that not all BIOSes present entry to those settings, notably for those who’re utilizing an older PC or a pre-built desktop from a PC firm moderately than a contemporary, self-built gaming PC with an enthusiast-grade motherboard. It is hardly a deal-breaker for Arc consumers, nevertheless it’s one other caveat for a GPU lineup that already has loads of them.