Intel's Game Plan For Getting The Xe Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Upstreamed

[blackiwid]

Nothing took them so long, it presently uses the i915 drm driver to good effect,

Thanks for clarifying, I just been a bit frustrated that the Arc gpus are not as good supported then the radeon cpu, and that is compared to the windows drivers, which are also in a bad state and not unlock the full power of the hardware even close.

So nice that it's ok with those igps. And yes Vulkan support for amd also is a bit messy, have to modify the system actively often instead of distros just come with sane defaults that are not hyper conservative, or you have to look up if your gpu is southern island or the other one... I couldn't care less, autodetect it and do the sane defaults to it so that vulkan works best.

And if you say your distro does that, maybe the biggest most important linux distro archlinux doesn't do that as far as I know, maybe the forks / other installers set it up correct but not the normal archlinux distro.

[hwertz]

So nice that it's ok with those igps. And yes Vulkan support for amd also is a bit messy, have to modify the system actively often instead of distros just come with sane defaults that are not hyper conservative, or you have to look up if your gpu is southern island or the other one... I couldn't care less, autodetect it and do the sane defaults to it so that vulkan works best.

And if you say your distro does that, maybe the biggest most important linux distro archlinux doesn't do that as far as I know, maybe the forks / other installers set it up correct but not the normal archlinux distro.

To be honest, I just assumed the Intel Xe (recent IGPU) and Arc were in almost identical driver shape, given the very similar architecture, but I don't know for sure having not run an Arc myself.

To be honest, I used to use Gentoo and Arch reminds me somewhat of it -- I'm not sure if Arch would consider it their job to have high-performance defaults for the driver setup, as opposed to having either stock or extremely conservative defaults (so the system at least boots) and then a user guide on what settings to mess about with. I do agree that I think distros (including Arch) SHOULD have better defaults in those regards though. I *do* appreciate those Arch guides, I'm running Ubuntu but (other than the bits about pacman since Ubuntu doesn't use it..) I've found Arch guides invaluable if I want to know what's REALLY going on under the hood to fix some problem or generally tweak or adjust some settings.

I'm not 100% stock; I run "Kisak PPA" for updated Mesa (currently I'm on 23.0.3), Ubuntu (and the Debian it's based on) are very conservative in Mesa version (even with "HWE" -- hardware enablement stack -- it's almost always 6+ months out of date.) Both my previous Ryzen, and current Xe, the GPU-specific driver was getting rapid improvements; I've started running PPA Mesa even on systems with older GPUs with well-established drivers, since Gallium and Mesa in general get plenty of improvements, and even drivers for old hardware like Intel Crocus get bug fixes and speedups every now and then. (It was a bit startling 2 or 3 years back when my friend's Sandy Bridge system got a Mesa update, and suddenly some games that'd chug along at like 20FPS started getting almost 30FPS. You don't expect a 50% FPS boost on 10+ year old hardware! Some update that was meant to speed up like 9th gen+ GPUs by 10-20% turned out to speed up the whole series.)

[blackiwid]

https://www.phoronix.com/review/a770-windows-linux/4

Across the limited selection of games tested based on those that were (automated) benchmark friendly and ran successfully with the Linux graphics driver stack too, the Arc Graphics A770 was roughly at 82% the speed under Linux as it was on Windows 11.

On the first look you would think well that is not that bad, but first it compares to that:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/radeon2022-windows-linux/7

Especially with the Radeon RX 7900 XTX that launched earlier this month the Windows performance was 11% faster compared to the Radeon RX 6800 XT and its mature driver support that was just 6.5% faster with Windows.

And second the windows driver is considered pretty bad, yes it makes big improvements but just because it started of as total mess, of course if you only gain 30-50% of the speed the hardware is able to, it's easier to make huge improvements then when you are already at >80%. What does it say to you that you have every month driver release notes that say "game XY 200% faster". that it really sucked before.

I mean it goes farther that just speed:

https://hothardware.com/news/intel-latest-game-on-arc-driver

Also, there are a number of games that will struggle with artifacts on Core processors' integrated graphics.

I would expect the same games over wine do probably have the same issues, also I hear about crashs even.

Now you can say, well if they had not even time to have stellar windows support you have more understanding for them not caring so much about linux support or you can say, if the windows driver is only accessing let's say 60% of the possible hardware's speed this difference is even less acceptable.

It probably comes down to the market, and yes for new hardware the 16gb variant is cheap and has lot's of potential, but if we look at the used market and wait let's say 6 months I assume the prices of let's say a 6800xt or even only a 6700xt is ruffly the same, yet has better driver support.

It get's beaten by a Radeon RX 6600 that costs in Germany 160 Euro on eBay, and the 8gb version of the Ark A770 costs 320 Euro so you get 0,5 FPS or less per buck with intel vs AMD. The gap will probably become smaller, but there is a long long way ahead. (if you get any fps and the game just not refuses to start )

https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux62-intel-radeon/5