Intel Arc Graphics Running On Fully Open-Source Linux Driver

[tildearrow]

i think AMD does not have the patent licenses ... and also i believe if you believe in the success of AV1 you plain and simple no longer need any 264 or 265 or whatever.

so why not just use AV1 like any other SANE person ?

My current processor is unable to play 2160p60 AV1 content, and it would take at least 500 years to convert these 4 years of content to AV1.

[tildearrow]

I was actually looking forward to this chip, because... what are the Linux GPU options anyway?

- Integrated Intel : works nice, open source, but slow
- Integrated AMD : works nice, open source, but no motherboards have 3+ HDMI/DVI (also not the fastest)
- AMD Radeon : too much power draw
- NVidia GeForce : proprietary drivers a PITA

ARC would totally fill this niche where you have multiple monitors and want an open source stack, but no gaming, e.g. video editing / transcoding /etc. I'm rooting for Intel in this case

	Stable?	Open?	Fast?
Intel	Yes	Yes	No
AMD	No	Yes	Yes
NVIDIA	Yes	No	Yes

[Neuro-Chef]

Let's hope the next card has Linux printed on the box when support for it becomes stable.

Printing Linux Support on the box would be dumb. Or at least a good way to have the support service spammed by DAUs trying to get video output from Ubuntu etc.

[kenren]

The drivers are fully open source, the firmware are not. This has been the situation for a long time now.

This has been the situation for a long time now, but don't change the means of the world "fully".
also old radeon driver like r200 run also wothout blob, but with lower performance or without certain features.
actually the firmware are more of only one file, bigger and in more case the free driver can't be loaded without firmware. This imho is what debian call "contrib" a free software that need proprietary software.
On CPU side I have avoided using old cpu lik pentium 4 and intel core 2 that seems to not need microcode/blob, but on gpu side the proprietary blob is needed.

[smitty3268]

My current processor is unable to play 2160p60 AV1 content, and it would take at least 500 years to convert these 4 years of content to AV1.

The original post was referring to arc graphics support, and it has hardware support for AV1 encoding and decoding so your current system doesn't make much difference in that context. And re-encoding old content is always a bad idea if you care about quality, because it's only going to go down, so I don't think anybody was suggesting that either, just using AV1 for new content.

[Venemo]

This has been the situation for a long time now, but don't change the means of the world "fully".

The drivers are fully open source.
(The firmware is not, but it's also not a driver.)

[kenren]

The drivers are fully open source.
(The firmware is not, but it's also not a driver.)

A driver that cannot run on the hardware for what is designed imho is not a driver.

[qarium]

My current processor is unable to play 2160p60 AV1 content, and it would take at least 500 years to convert these 4 years of content to AV1.

right. but do you think that in the future AV1 will be more or less important ?

i think it will be more and more relevant. and i am sure this will become the defacto standard and all other codexes will vanish from existence...

[Venemo]

A driver that cannot run on the hardware for what is designed imho is not a driver.

A driver is a piece of software that runs on your CPU, a firmware is a piece of software that runs on the device. These two things cooperate to make the HW draw pretty pixels on your screen.

If you disagree, that's fine, then I guess you can say that I just work on a "not-a-driver".

[yump]

I was actually looking forward to this chip, because... what are the Linux GPU options anyway?

- Integrated Intel : works nice, open source, but slow
- Integrated AMD : works nice, open source, but no motherboards have 3+ HDMI/DVI (also not the fastest)
- AMD Radeon : too much power draw
- NVidia GeForce : proprietary drivers a PITA

ARC would totally fill this niche where you have multiple monitors and want an open source stack, but no gaming, e.g. video editing / transcoding /etc. I'm rooting for Intel in this case

Unlikely that this will use any less energy than the comparable-number-of-video-outputs AMD card, especially if you limit the maximum frequency. Pretty much any discrete graphics card has to spend power on the PCIe bus, and in my experience having a dGPU plugged in prevents the CPU from reaching its lowest package c-states. Unfortunately. AMD's performance competitor is poor for non-gaming uses, because it's limited to 2 displays and lacks AV1 decode acceleration.