this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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How good/bad are the Linux drivers for Intel Arc GPUs right now? (pawb.social)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/linuxquestions
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Title. Been meaning to upgrade my GPU, and Intel Arcs are undercutting their AMD equivalent by quite a bit?

But like, I am not going to switch back to Windows. And I don't want to spend a lot of money on a new computer part just to learn it doesn't support my OS properly.

Now. I did search for this and found a phoronix benchmark thing -- But it's from almost a full year ago.

So.

Anyone have an Intel Arc GPU and can tell how they are doing as of now?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Pretty good. I’ve got an a380 running in a media server that is just fkn amazing. And a 750 in my desktop.

I did VFIO on a nvidia 3070 and VMed Windows, but after a bit I just didn’t go in to windows and ran most games I play on the 750. Runs at 2560xwhatever the 16:9 other one is really well.

The games I’ve been playing are mostly CS2, BG3 - nothing super tough, but both >60fps, no issues. I haven’t done any benchmarking or equivs though. Otherwise other less graphically intensive games of course have no problems.

BG3 earlier had vulkan issues with some severe artifacting, but that was around launch.

These days, not even remotely a problem.

For the a380, I’m doing transcodes of some all x264 to AV1, and apart from some funkiness around the open intel-media-sdk vs closed, where the closed sdk spat out complete garbage. It handles the transcodes amazingly well for such a cheap little card.

I honestly never thought I’d say that Intel of all people could produce a GPU that was great.. but Arc really is great.

The two cards set me back about $350 all up and the grand joke is the 3070 is sitting there kinda doing nothing these days.

The desktop system is Arch linux and the media server is Proxmox with passthrough to debian.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This is great to know. I am actually looking to switch to AV1-based media archives and I was looking at an Arc card to be the transcoder for Jellyfin after I migrate from Plex.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Yeh A380 arc really shines here. A couple of unsolicited notes if you go that route.

Ffmpeg > 6.0

VAAPI api is the winner for encoder, libsvtav1 is good too. - libaom-av1 is REALLY slow.

intel-media-sdk is needed - at least in debian, the free version in bookworm and testing repos is perfect - the non-free version mangled the files Decoder support in hardware is a thing to watch out for. (Plex+AppleTV had to have a profile set and forced on it, but that was really simple)

At the moment, I'm running three encoding streams simultaneously and it uses around 95% of the GPU BUSY stats - I don't strictly know if that's the best metric to measure against, but it is good enough for my half-arsed efforts.

Given the price I've seen the 750's on sale for, it wasn't that much of a reach to put a 750 in the server as well, but it was a physical space constraint plus once I'm finished the encoding effort, it would be way more than is ever needed for on the fly transcodes or one offs. Plus there are low profile A380 variants and it doesn't require an extra power connector*.

*Turns out the Asrock one I have does require an 8pin - but it looks like the low profile version doesn't. So maybe discount that point

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I have a pretty big case because I wanted space for a lot of hard drives. It's a lot of consumer-grade equipment from years ago.

I actually appreciate all the advice, I've got a lot more information to proceed with now. I'll probably wait for a sale and see what card I really want to get, because I could also use the machine for local game streaming in addition to the transcoding, so I might wait for a sale and get a 750.

Right now the current block is that I need to do some BIOS hacks to enable RE-BAR (which has been available since PCIe 2.0) so that the Arc card works properly, but there's a nice little guide I found that's been proven to work all the way back to Broadwell and Sandy Bridge processors.

Thanks again for the advice! I love tech, it's such a world of possibilities.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What kernel version are you running?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

6.7 on desktop 6.5 on server

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Very interesting. Really seems like Arc is becoming a great budget video card. You may not get 1440p at 140fps+ on brand new AAA titles but definitely serviceable for a lot.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Michael literally released an updated article of the state of Arc two days ago https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-early-2024

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

In my defence Google search has gone to absolute shit in recent months.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Ok I'm glad you've said this, because I have also found that searches for some obscure thing that'd previously find me exactly what I wanted are now returning unrelated pages and spam.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I'm interested in trying to install Linux on my arc laptop, I'm wondering as well. I might try in the next few days.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I've heard about issues with vkd3d but I haven't checked in for a while. There's a chance it could already be resolved

[–] possiblylinux127 2 points 9 months ago

I've heard they are good for all kernels newer than 6.0 but I've never actually used one.