ASRock Challenger Arc Graphics B570 Arrives For Linux Testing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ASRock Challenger Arc Graphics B570 Arrives For Linux Testing

The Intel Arc Graphics B570 graphics card isn't hitting retailers until January and the review embargo doesn't expire until then, but fair game now are pictures/video of the Arc B570 hardware... The ASRock Challenger Arc Graphics B570 arrived today for Linux testing at Phoronix in the coming weeks for this second Battlemage graphics card...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/ASRock-Challenger-Arc-B570

[geerge]

Seems like a bad deal. Almost priced like an upsell, but the B580 is already cheap. Probably mostly for OEM's or as a last resort if B580 stock is low or B580 raises in price.

[Kjell]

Backplate looks very similar to ASUS TUF hmm

ASUS TUF 7900 XT

https://i.imgur.com/nKR03Ga.png

[NeoMorpheus]

Funny how neither the windows nor linux fanbois are trashing the horrible drivers that all Arc gpus have so far.

Oh thats right, only AMD have bad drivers…

Snide aside, I do find that interesting how these things keep getting so much praise just because its a bit cheaper.

[the-burrito-triangle]

Funny how neither the windows nor linux fanbois are trashing the horrible drivers that all Arc gpus have so far.

Oh thats right, only AMD have bad drivers…

Snide aside, I do find that interesting how these things keep getting so much praise just because its a bit cheaper.

What rock have you been living under? I've been bashing Xe's Vulkan driver for as long as I have been profiling it vs. the OpenGL driver (which is actually pretty damn good).

And here's a dose of reality for you:

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/intel-linux/1513197-windows-11-vs-linux-benchmarks-for-intel-arc-b-series-battlemage-shows-strengths-weaknesses

Read all about people's disappointment with Xe's Vulkan performance.

I also have an AMD RX 7600, which is ran "headless" with an intel RKL Xe iGPU as the primary card connected to my monitor. Intel has waaaaay better video decoding and OpenCL support than AMD, while AMD has waaaaay better Vulkan driver and gaming performance (pre Battlemage).

The AMD Windows drivers are absolute trash. The first time I put my RX 7600 in my machine and installed the drivers it crashed Windows 10. In Linux, the card worked fine from day one. I no longer use Windows, so I don't really know if they have improved since then. But I also don't really care anymore. So meh.

[Quackdoc]

I wonder if you could run benchmarks testing I915 vs XE on these cards, They do report that i915 is compatible and im wondering if some driver issues are related to XE.

[the-burrito-triangle]

I wonder if you could run benchmarks testing I915 vs XE on these cards, They do report that i915 is compatible and im wondering if some driver issues are related to XE.

That's a fair question. My post (and general complaints) are actually referring to Xe first gen HW with i915 kernel driver and mesa Vulkan vs OpenGL performance. First gen Xe can "work" with the new Xe kernel driver but actually performs worse when I tested--and I got a lot of warnings stating that "this is not a supported configuration" (or something to that effect). I'm sure the same is true for Xe2 HW (LNL and Battlemage) if used with i915.

All my testing has been with TSC clock source, IOMMU/VT-x/VT-d, GuC, and HUC enabled (i915.enable_guc=3 intel_iommu=on iommu=pt) as well as i915.modeset=1 and any relevant GNOME "experimental features" enabled. So any kernel / HW optimizations available are being used. (And I've disabled all watchdog timers--as they are broken on my system anyways.) I'm also using the CachyOS kernel with Fedora. So, I don't think I'm leaving any low hanging fruit that might improve system performance. I will say that the TGL Xe iGPU (with 96EUs) is surprisingly powerful for a mobile GPU. Even the desktop variant with RKL (limited to 32EUs) is surprisingly good. But, goddamn, the Vulkan performance is trash when compared to OpenGL. Annoyingly, the Gallium Nine state tracker (which has great performance as a D3D9 to OpenGL wrapper) can have issues with Xe HW (shows garbage on the screen) when used with Gamescope and in some games like Warcraft III classic while my AMD RX 7600 works fine.

If all I cared about was general compute (OpenCL et al), Intel is a great pick. If all I cared about was video decoding / encoding, Intel is again, a great pick. But for games... Intel is hit and miss. So much so, that AMD is the better choice. But AMD HW has its own issues--especially on Windows. I actually like using an Intel iGPU with an AMD dGPU. But, sadly, an Nvidia card would be simpler and perform better. If I was still using Windows, I would have stuck with Nvidia, but having moved to Linux I'll be buying AMD (CPUs and GPUs) for the foreseeable future.

[ahrs]

Seems like a bad deal. Almost priced like an upsell, but the B580 is already cheap. Probably mostly for OEM's or as a last resort if B580 stock is low or B580 raises in price.

It says a lot when the card they're trying to upsell you on is already reasonably priced. Nvidia could learn a thing or two from them, of course they're the market leader so they get to have terrible upsell pricing (8 GB of VRAM on the x060 series cards is still a joke that only exists to push you to the x060 TI or above).

[sophisticles]

No need to wait for a review, we know the specs of the B570 and the B580 and we know the benchmark results for the B580.

A bit of simple math and you can predict the B570 results with a high degree of certainty.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Looking forward to the benchmarks even if we already know how they will turn out. I like the idea above of a run with i915 too.

Also, ASRock and their damn unnecessarily tall cooler designs even on lowend cards .