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.

  • Skeletonek@lemmy.zipEnglish
    4·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.net
    3·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • LeFantome@programming.dev
    2·
    7 months ago

    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?

  • Unyieldingly@lemmy.world
    1·
    7 months ago

    Wait for Battlemage, the DG2 cards will not have full support with the newer drivers also BattleMage is coming out soon.

  • festus@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
    1·
    7 months ago

    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).