I saw the other day about the new video of Hardware Unboxed where they benchmarked the Intel GPUs with newer drivers on Windows. I’m also interested in buying one but I’d like to know how good they are on Linux. Since the GPUs will be using Vulkan renderer on Linux, I was hoping they would be better overall, or rather have a decent performance. What is your general experience with them? Also, do they work well with Wayland? Thanks for any and all inputs.
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Phoronix has recent benchmarks.
For gaming the price / performance is on par with similar mid-priced AMD GPUs, but there are still some smaller incompatibility issues and the idle power draw is significantly higher.
For compute they are faster than AMD, but 3rd party software support is similarly bad, i.e. no CUDA.
The Intel GPU drivers have been improving rapidly. If you buy one, you are making a bet that this will continue.
The other comments here are typical of feedback overall. People who actually own the hardware report that everything is basically fine although there are still a few small issues and performance from game to game can vary with some much better than you would expect and some quite a bit worse. You are betting on the drivers closing that gap.
Only you can say if the above means they are ready. If you are going to be frustrated by any issues and the titles with lacklustre performance? If so, Intel is probably not for you at this time.
Are you going to be happy today and increasingly happy as the platform matures? If so, go for it. It is clear that, for the money, the hardware punches above its weight but is held back by the software. The software is likely to improve. Does that sound good or bad to you?
I’ve had an A770 Limited Edition since its release in late 2022. Overall, I’m happy with it. The drivers were a mess at launch but now everything works as expected. Performance is decent in the games I play, though I have a 144Hz 4K monitor and it’s not really capable of that resolution and refresh rate except on the lightest esports games so I use FSR on most games. My most played game is Overwatch and it hits 144Hz with dynamic resolution scaling on and medium settings. I want to buy a higher end GPU eventually to really push this monitor but waiting to see what happens with the next generation of Intel and AMD cards (NVIDIA is not even in the running unless NVK suddenly gets performance parity with the proprietary drivers).
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I personally find the “boycott X” to be mostly useless
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Intel is Israeli? I thought they were an American company?
Either way just get a second hand Intel CPU if you want Intel and don’t need the latest and greatest.
I think their main campus/fab facilities are there.
I agree but what if you buy secondhand?
The problem is, for the current Arc achitecture (DG2), the officially supported driver is the old i915. Xe will always be ‘experimental’ and it won’t have media encoding capabilities because Intel said it’s “too hard to implement for DG2”. It’s better to wait for the Battlemage / DG3 graphics cards so you can use better Xe driver that can also handle media encoding and decoding.
As for the raw performance on the i915. It’s terrible. Most of the games that I was testing work better on my RX 6600 than Arc A750. The only positive thing I can tell about this card is that it performed really well in terms of stability on Wayland, and a really great video encoding efficiency.
I’ve heard the drivers are a mess for gaming. Better off with Radeon for Linux ATM. I made the same consideration several months ago and the poor compatibility and performance numbers pushed me to a 6600 XT.
Wait for Battlemage, the DG2 cards will not have full support with the newer drivers also BattleMage is coming out soon.
They have open source drivers so they are not bad but it’s Intel arc so you’re probably better of with Radeon if you game. I do use an a380 in my jellyfin computer and apart from having to backport the kernel (Debian user problems) it works great. I did play Scrap Mechanic on it on Wayland and I didn’t notice any issues but I heard they are really inconsistent in different games.
its been ok, some things still have issues, I get graphical glitches and lower then expected performance in genshin, not sure if this is a dxvk or an anv thing, but it’s not too much lower. It is a bit lower then my rx580 4g in the second slot however
So it’s worse then the lower performance version of a 7 year old GPU?
the a380 is known to be more or less the same performance as a rx580 on windows right now, lower performance for full float ops, and higher perf for half float ops, but you do have a newer feature set, so It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that it would preform in the same ballpark as the rx580,
as I said it is lower then expected performance, meaning performance on windows is higher, but this should really not come as a surprise IMO. Linux has less development effort being done to it, and there haven’t really been all that many bug reports, of which I’m guilty for as I havent been reporting bugs i’ve come across.
Right, just crazy how poor it is in comparison.
im 50:50 on it, it’s a good upgrade feature wise and the price is decent. I would like to see more perf out of it, but thats a full float vs half float thing
Like other people have said, day to day it works with no issues, I’m also running Wayland; but it did struggle with picking up both my monitors’ VRR, and I ended up changing random things in the monitor EDID to get it working.
Related question - how usable (in practical terms) are these cards for running AI models like Llama or Stable Diffusion? I know it’s technically possible but I don’t want to install a billion AUR packages and a custom kernel, etc.
