Intel Highlights Their Progress On Arc Graphics Drivers Since Launch

[Barley9432]

[QUOTE=ryao;n1370569]

How can you tell?


You can see the API the game is using with MSI Afterburner and compare with and without DXVK's dls. Intel also talked about it on their Q&A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omUTYlm2Al0

They're working on vulkan pipeline support, seems close to being merged: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/...8#note_1748276

[ryao]

This is incorrect, actually do your research and run the game. Intel made a native DirectX 9 driver for Arc on Windows and only use DXVK in selected games. I tested CSGO for example (the game they keep praising), it uses the native DirectX 9 driver.

How can you tell?

Also, they really should implement vulkan graphics pipeline library support to their driver so that they can use DXVK without stutter for all D3D9 games. I assume that the stutter issues are solved by GPL support like they are on Nvidia graphics and that if Mesa does not have it, their windows driver does not have it either.

[ryao]

The deal breaker is that you cannot even get a box (pc, server, workstation) to even post with an ARC if any virtualization is enabled in the bios:
I just gave up on it after the following response from intel: (couldn’t even post.. why would OS even matter?)


Hugo_Intel (Moderator) posted a new reply in Intel® ARC™ Graphics on 01-13-2023 01:40 PM:

Hello radtraveller

Thank you for contacting Intel® ARC™ Graphics Communities. I am sorry to hear that you are experiencing issues with your Intel® Arc™ A770 Graphics.
Please note that virtualization is not supported on the Intel® Arc™ A770, more information is in this article. Also, the only Linux distribution that has been validated by Intel so far is Ubuntu 22.04.

In order to troubleshoot this issue, please disable virtualization in your system and if possible try Ubuntu 22.04 to check if the issue persists.

Best Regards,
Hugo O.

Intel Customer Support Technician.

There are different kinds of virtualization. The one that is mentioned in the article that Intel’s technician linked is GPU virtualization via PCI-E SR-IOV. The graphics card should not care about whether CPU virtualization extensions are enabled. The only issue you might have with it is if you were to try to pass the graphics card to a VM via VFIO.

That said, are you seriously unable to get a machine to post unless you disable VT-x? This sounds like a BIOS compatibility issue.

[zexelon]

Just going by what the intel representative said and personal experience attempting to add an ARC 770 to my dell precision 7920.
(which I use for hosting alot of virtual machines for test lab)

I did send a follow up email to him stating I wasn’t trying to use the arc inside the vms/passthrough

..but I couldn’t get to that point anyway since the workstation refused to even POST with the card installed while virtual extensions enabled in bios..
the only thing he told me was that all virtualization support MUST be disabled on bios.

no reply from Dell at all to emails about this.
Latest bios didn’t change anything either.

Disabling virtual extensions in bios is NOT happening.

If someone got an ARC to work with virtualization enabled in bios, then they are better than the intel rep..

Oh man, yah, I did read the "Intel Rep" comment, and it was 100% an "I am going to regurgitate the lowest common denominator answer to make this problem go away for me" type of answer.

That being said I would hazard to say the problem is 85% likely to be with the Dell system and their bios. I did run into issues like this back in the day with enabling virtualization on some early i7 ASUS motherboards and they had specifically gimped the vt-x/vt-d implementation and refused to fix the issue "because they didn't support that use case".

[Radtraveller]

I am curious about this, virtualization turned on or off should not prevent the card from posting in any way. Windows requires virtualization to be enabled in certain cases (ex. WSL2) so this would be a massive issue for Intel Arc if it was the case.

A quick cursory search also reveals that these GPU's can be passed through to a VM (with some work): https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comm...through_to_vm/

This would indicate that they work just fine with virtualization enabled. It sounds like it may be a motherboard bios issue or such.

All this said... I have no actual experience with the Intel ARC, but I am looking at possibly getting one to be my systems host GPU so the rest of the GPUs can be passed around to VMs.

Just going by what the intel representative said and personal experience attempting to add an ARC 770 to my dell precision 7920.
(which I use for hosting alot of virtual machines for test lab)

I did send a follow up email to him stating I wasn’t trying to use the arc inside the vms/passthrough

..but I couldn’t get to that point anyway since the workstation refused to even POST with the card installed while virtual extensions enabled in bios..
the only thing he told me was that all virtualization support MUST be disabled on bios.

no reply from Dell at all to emails about this.
Latest bios didn’t change anything either.

Disabling virtual extensions in bios is NOT happening.

If someone got an ARC to work with virtualization enabled in bios, then they are better than the intel rep..

[Barley9432]

Have they contributed anything to DXVK?

Yes they have, this one for example has been stuck in review since September: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/pull/2967

There's other pulls from Intel devs I believe that have been merged

[Barley9432]

Oh look, we became 43% faster in D3D9 (by utilizing the open source project DXVK). Bugger off, Intel.

This is incorrect, actually do your research and run the game. Intel made a native DirectX 9 driver for Arc on Windows and only use DXVK in selected games. I tested CSGO for example (the game they keep praising), it uses the native DirectX 9 driver.

[Danny3]

Have they contributed anything to DXVK?
Does their GPU support SR-IOV?

[RejectModernity]

I bought A770, and it a hot pile of garbage. A lot of Vulkan extensions still not supported, issues in mesa have been open for a year or two. I can only play DX11 games with DXVK_ASYNC. I don't know what Intel engineers were doing, but the drivers are definitely not ready. Even on windows not all is perfect, dx11 games suck ass and software is trash. But yeah, av1 encoder/decoder is nice, I'll give them that.

[zexelon]

The deal breaker is that you cannot even get a box (pc, server, workstation) to even post with an ARC if any virtualization is enabled in the bios:
I just gave up on it after the following response from intel: (couldn’t even post.. why would OS even matter?)


Hugo_Intel (Moderator) posted a new reply in Intel® ARC™ Graphics on 01-13-2023 01:40 PM:

Hello radtraveller

Thank you for contacting Intel® ARC™ Graphics Communities. I am sorry to hear that you are experiencing issues with your Intel® Arc™ A770 Graphics.
Please note that virtualization is not supported on the Intel® Arc™ A770, more information is in this article. Also, the only Linux distribution that has been validated by Intel so far is Ubuntu 22.04.

In order to troubleshoot this issue, please disable virtualization in your system and if possible try Ubuntu 22.04 to check if the issue persists.

Best Regards,
Hugo O.

Intel Customer Support Technician.

I am curious about this, virtualization turned on or off should not prevent the card from posting in any way. Windows requires virtualization to be enabled in certain cases (ex. WSL2) so this would be a massive issue for Intel Arc if it was the case.

A quick cursory search also reveals that these GPU's can be passed through to a VM (with some work): https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comm...through_to_vm/

This would indicate that they work just fine with virtualization enabled. It sounds like it may be a motherboard bios issue or such.

All this said... I have no actual experience with the Intel ARC, but I am looking at possibly getting one to be my systems host GPU so the rest of the GPUs can be passed around to VMs.