Intel Open-Source Vulkan Linux Driver Now Exposes Ray-Tracing For Arc Graphics

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Open-Source Vulkan Linux Driver Now Exposes Ray-Tracing For Arc Graphics

Ahead of the flagship Arc Graphics A770 launching on 12 October, Intel's Mesa "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver has finally exposed the ray-tracing support for DG2/Alchemist graphics hardware...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Vulkan-Ray-Tracing-Enable

[vegabook]

Intel is rapidly making an excellent case for its Arc series of GPUs.
* pricing looks good (especially if 329 is for the 16GB Arc 770 but even 50 dollars more for that would be okay)
* intel linux driver development is top notch generally
* intel is not playing games (yet 🙏) on segmenting compute out to "pro" cards (AMD 🤦)
* forward looking architecture with ray tracing first class citizen right up front
* interesting looking OneAPI compute software stack that actually looks like having a chance of competing with Cuda (ROCm 🥴)
* high quality open source commitment on all of the above. Funding for Krita good example of wide-ecosystem vision.

I truly hope that Intel stays the course with these cards and I'm going to buy one. It'll also be fantastic if the same software stack works on the iGPUs.

[skeevy420]

Tell me about it. Like a lot of us, I'm also very interested in that 16GB Arc 770.

From a consumer perspective I hope these get AMD and NVIDIA to lower their prices.

[TemplarGR]

Tell me about it. Like a lot of us, I'm also very interested in that 16GB Arc 770.

From a consumer perspective I hope these get AMD and NVIDIA to lower their prices.

I hope they do not. I loathe comments like this. "Ohhhhh i want that company to invest heavily into finally bringing some competition to the market because the duopoly has been exploiting us for years, but i don't want to buy any, i just want to buy from the duopoly cheaper".... No, buy Intel, no matter what. Vote with your wallet in favour of the consumer and against greed. Support competition with actions, not just words. It wasn't long ago that people said the same things for AMD cpus/gpus "oh please AMD be competitive so NVIDIA can drop prices, i want to buy a cheaper Geforce".... It doesn't work that way....

[schmidtbag]

I hope they do not. I loathe comments like this. "Ohhhhh i want that company to invest heavily into finally bringing some competition to the market because the duopoly has been exploiting us for years, but i don't want to buy any, i just want to buy from the duopoly cheaper".... No, buy Intel, no matter what. Vote with your wallet in favour of the consumer and against greed. Support competition with actions, not just words. It wasn't long ago that people said the same things for AMD cpus/gpus "oh please AMD be competitive so NVIDIA can drop prices, i want to buy a cheaper Geforce".... It doesn't work that way....

I agree that wanting prices to lower just so you can buy from the competition is a dick move, but I don't think that's what skeevy420 is trying to say. In general, both AMD and Nvidia are increasing prices at unsettling rates. Nvidia is setting the price trend while all AMD has to do is be the cheaper option. However, though Intel will probably be more competitive as drivers mature, they're still going to be a bit too far behind in this first release. Unless Intel's 770 handily outperforms everything it is priced against on release day, I think it's justifiable that people don't want to buy what is effectively experimental last-gen hardware. Intel is notorious for prematurely abandoning things (particularly on Windows) so as of right now, I don't feel comfortable getting a GPU like this.

As for "vote with your wallet in favour of the consumer and against greed", you do know this is Intel we're talking about, right? Greed is what led them to fall behind AMD in the CPU market. Greed is what led to so many of their anticompetitive lawsuits. Greed is why they kept releasing 4c/8t i7s for I think 7 years straight. Intel is not your friend - they're only starting to care about consumer needs because they're losing in almost every market they participate in.

[LinAGKar]

For me, the A310 looks like it could be interesting for providing media transcoding on my media server, with no iGP. Radeon isn't really an option for that since they cripple the media engine on the low end GPUs (and they're still more expensive than the A310), and Nvidia doesn't even seem to have any low end lately.

I'm just wondering when we'll be able to buy them.

[skeevy420]

I agree that wanting prices to lower just so you can buy from the competition is a dick move, but I don't think that's what skeevy420 is trying to say. In general, both AMD and Nvidia are increasing prices at unsettling rates. Nvidia is setting the price trend while all AMD has to do is be the cheaper option.

That's exactly what I meant.

[hartree]

Too bad ANV and VKD3D don't work together yet, but I'm still looking forward to seeing their Vulkan RT performance.

[Quackdoc]

the A380 shows a lot of promise, but it's still very buggy, I plan on waiting until stable kernel starts shipping before making any judgements, I don't exactly have a clean environment, so I want to wait until arch starts shipping kernel 6.0 before diving in and testing deep

[smitty3268]

* pricing looks good (especially if 329 is for the 16GB Arc 770 but even 50 dollars more for that would be okay)

It's obviously the price for the 8GB model. They said the 770 starts at that price. There will be more expensive 16GB models.