Intel Highlights Their Progress On Arc Graphics Drivers Since Launch

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Highlights Their Progress On Arc Graphics Drivers Since Launch

Intel this week held a presentation to talk up the progress they've made on their (Windows) graphics driver since launch for Arc Graphics where for many games there are double digit performance improvements to enjoy with the budget-friendly Arc Graphics A750 and A770 graphics cards...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Windows-DG2-Since-Launch

[bezirg]

I really hope this new xe linux driver will finally show the potential of the arc alchemist hardware

[ryuanlu]

Just wonder if they fixed idle power consumption or not. Or someone knows how ASPM L1 works for these cards ?

[Schalefer]

Just wonder if they fixed idle power consumption or not. Or someone knows how ASPM L1 works for these cards ?

These are Intel's instructions for Windows, essentially requiring ASPM L1.x. [1]

It seems to work on Linux too (A750):

$ cat /sys/module/pcie_aspm/parameters/policy
default performance powersave [powersupersave]​

powersupersave being L1.x.

Unscientifically measuring with a cheap adapter at the power outlet I would argue that it dropped maybe ten Watts, but still ca. fifteen Watt more than the previous RDNA1 card.

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us.../graphics.html

[Radtraveller]

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.

[You-]

Since a lot of these improvements are moving the Windows stack to more closely mirror the Linux stack I wonder if its just catchup there or there are any performance improvements on linux too.

[kiffmet]

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

[qarium]

on linux its no fun yet i bought a intel arc a380 for my mothers computer and on fedora 37 nothing works but software rendering at 1024x800 pixel.

people have to wait until fedora 38 is released to get intel arc driver support.

[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.

[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.