Actually got an A770. Quite nice, so far.

[albatorsk]

So, I did the thing and just couldn't be bothered to wait for the RX7900 be readily available, while the A770 are "everywhere" to be found for a reasonable price.

One thing I learned quickly is how absolutely essential it is to have Resizeable BAR enabled. I mean, the card is barely able to struggle through with simple 3D rendering without ReBAR. I thought I had it enabled, but I missed that I also had to disable CSM for it to work.

Getting up and running with Ubuntu was fairly painless, and for the first time I'm actually using Wayland instead of Xorg, and things aren't bugging out as they were on my old GTX 970.

Just thought I'd share my experiences and if anyone is "brave" (or dumb?) enough to want to check out the A770 and have any questions beforehand, let me know.

[abott]

I also got one, running fresh Windows/Arch installs only 2 days old right now. It's running good on Windows over all. Fortnite has a game bug that causes crashes. Most other games seem to work, Tarkov got in to game pretty easily with good framerates. On Linux with mesa-git, Wayland seems to mostly work. Slightly more flickering on setup/login than on AMD Xorg/Wayland, but I'm sure it'll get ironed out. Only issue I have is a pretty big stopper. My video decoding might get 5 frames before freezing forever, on all browsers. I'm not sure why this is, I'm going to install linux-git tonight to see if it's just a kernel decode issue. If not, I'm not sure what else might be up. It's a very basic install, not much configured/changed from default because I figured I'd have more issues. But over all, seems usable. It should be fine once I can watch YouTube on it.

Anyone have any ideas/seen this, I'd like to know if linux-git would fix it before doing it if possible. Other than that, yeah seems to be okay. I hope it matures and the stack gets the time it needs to really pull out the performance these cards have.

[pioto]

Does A770 work with modern distro's out of the box, e.g. Debian Testing (mesa 22.3.2-1, kernel 6.0.0-6-amd64) or equivalent (I do not mind flags like force probe etc..)?
I am primarily interested in smooth Gnome X11/Wayland experience (4k60) and working accelerated Firefox video playback.

[abott]

Not OOTB, however I learned some stuff getting mine working:

i915 kernel probe force probably isn't needed, however I have it added to be sure and should be fixed in 6.2 and probably backported.

Intel MEI for firmware updates required me to compile linux-git from AUR and do a config on it to enable the modules listed HERE for it, CONFIG_INTEL_MEI_GSC=m and CONFIG_INTEL_MEI_PXP=m to load the newest firmware. Probably wasn't need to work but I had to fix it to fix the video not playing I had assumed.

Lastly, I figured out after fixing all the dmesg errors about the A770 that it wasn't firmware causing videos not to play, it was a pulse package sneaking in somewhere during my fresh install. Removing that rogue pulse package and making sure pipewire-pulse was installed instead (Full pipewire setup here.) had corrected it. Seemed to be just a conflict there. Now everything seems to be working as on my previous install.

Only had one odd crash a few days ago but otherwise in my very limited time on my KDE desktop, it seems to be okay for now. Now that it's usable to do work and watch youtube on at the same time, I'll be on it over the weekend and if anyone has any questions I'll answer too. But yeah, seems solid now. I'm excited to finally be able to use Linux again, no way I can use a PC without youtube on my second screen. Sadly no 4K monitor to answer the above question, but I do have 1440p and up to 165Hz and it's fine at 120Hz for myself on the card. HDMI does exhibit random garbage on reboot and whatnot, but haven't seen it since yesterday so we'll see if the firmware updates fixed it I guess. Any questions, I'm open to test whatever. About to test OBS over the weekend probably, so we'll see how that goes.

[abott]

Few updates:

Linux works fine, no random crashes or everything. Actually great for a new hardware platform IMO.

I play Fortnite with family on Windows, and performance was horrid. However, Fortnite's update yesterday took that mess and made it able to run solid 1440p, 100fps on Epic sans nanite and whatnot. Extremely happy with that game now, was a stuttery mess all game previously.

Window's control panel app is fucking horrific, and I'd rather have literally nothing it's so bad. You can't even move the window, the desktop icon launches a "overlay" onto the desktop and it just sucks. I'm using the beta drivers released on Jan 12th for Windows, they're fine. Windows also leaks memory absolutely everywhere it seems, Fortnite will show 7GB when task manager says the card has about 4GB of data and 17GB main RAM used, so it might be leaking tons of data that it keeps CPU side, but I don't have crashes randomly. Probably my 32GB RAM helping that side.

Only strange issue I have is sometimes the card boots and throws tons of garbage through HDMI and a power cycle is needed when it happens. Only happens on boot/reboot, so probably just an updated firmware to fix that up eventually.

After that fortnite fix, I'm basically completely content with this card right now. It was a good decision to help make good 1440p playable until I get a better card later this year/next year with a new build.

[pioto]

I got myself Arc A770 few days ago.
Overall it is a very solid general desktop experience. Debian Testing still requires i915.force_probe=56a0 setting, but that should shortly change when the kernel 6.2 is released. Desktop rendering is very fluid at 4k60, all video codecs (playback) seem to work out of the box in Firefox.

The bad:

• trying to encode in OBS (vaapi_x264) causes segmentation fault (DG2) while it works when iGPU (UHD 770) is selected; also AV1 is not listed as an option at all
• lspci reports speed PCIe1.0/x1:

  LnkSta: Speed 2.5GT/s (ok), Width x1 (ok)

  I raised a bug. I cannot provide them with more information as the login to their site is broken at the moment
• OpenCL hangs on Debian Testing but it works with Ubuntu 22.04 with their dedicated OEM 5.17 kernel and some special packages. I do hope that with kernel 6.2 GPGPU will work out of the box on any distro.
• I wanted to run Pytorch using their XPU backend (on Ubuntu) but that seems broken due to some unresolved libmkl dependencies (probably it is a version problem)

Overall I think it is not too bad for their first iteration, I am optimistic:-) I hope Intel will manage to sort out all teething problems.

[shanedav4]

I got myself Arc A770 few days ago.
Overall it is a very solid general desktop experience. Debian Testing still requires i915.force_probe=56a0 setting, but that should shortly change when the kernel 6.2 is released. Desktop rendering is very fluid at 4k60, all video codecs (playback) seem to work out of the box in Firefox.

The bad:

• lspci reports speed PCIe1.0/x1: I raised a bug. I cannot provide them with more information as the login to their site is broken at the moment...

I picked up the cheap A380 and am having the same problem with the PCIe reporting 1.0/x1. I noticed that there are three new Intel pcie devices besides the GPU and GPU audio. One of them is reading PCIe width x8 and a speed of 16GT/s. The other two are only read x1

[pioto]

Those three devices are a single PCIe switch with one upstream and two downstream ports. Upstream port connects to the host and reports correct bandwidth (arc a380- 16gt/s x8 and arc a770 16gt/s x16). Downstream ports connect to VGA and audio and those report 2.5GT/s x1. They report slow speed in link status but also in link capabilities. Looks like a firmware bug which causes the device to report wrong capability, and the link status is probably an aftermath of enumeration based on wrong data. The card seems to run at the proper speed.