Intel Updates Packaged Arc Graphics Driver For Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Updates Packaged Arc Graphics Driver For Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

While Linux 6.2 supports Arc Graphics out-of-the-box and Mesa 23.1 has good OpenGL/Vulkan support, for those running Linux distributions on older kernels and Mesa packages there is less than ideal support -- either no support at all or having to resort to force-enabling the DG2/Alchemist support and potentially running on older OpenGL/Vulkan drivers with various problems. To ease the experience for those running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Intel has been maintaining a packaged version of their DRM kernel driver as a DKMS module as well as updated Mesa packages...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Arc-Update-21-April

[leuc]

a performance comparison between the two stacks (5.17-oem + intel dkms vs 6.2) on the ARC series would be super interesting

[nyanmisaka]

a performance comparison between the two stacks (5.17-oem + intel dkms vs 6.2) on the ARC series would be super interesting

At least the DKMS driver contains a new dispatch model that used in compute-runtime to fix the long latency of OpenCL kernel launching.

It's not available in upstream 6.2+ for the time being. Waiting for their acknowledgment to confirm if this will be added into upstream in the future.

https://github.com/intel/compute-runtime/issues/600#issuecomment-1494237522

[qarium]

some people here in the forum praise intel as the new opensource gold

i bought a a380 for my mothers computer and in fedora37 it did only work in 1024x800 pixel fail save without any gpu acceleration.
now with fedora 38 the gpu starts to support the 4K resolution of the monitor.

I honestly don't know how the Packaged Arc Graphics Driver for ubuntu works or performs..

but from my own perspective and i have a vega64 to upgrade to an intel GPU makes no sense what so ever.

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-RX-Vega-64-vs-Intel-Arc-A770/3933vsm1850973

userbenchmark claims the intel arc 770 is +27% faster but linux benchmarks with the opensource drivers tells otherwise.
and the Arc-a770 is to slow for raytracing...

so in my point of view intel needs to build much faster gpus or else they compete agaist 5-6 year old hardware like my vega64...

[WannaBeOCer]

some people here in the forum praise intel as the new opensource gold

i bought a a380 for my mothers computer and in fedora37 it did only work in 1024x800 pixel fail save without any gpu acceleration.
now with fedora 38 the gpu starts to support the 4K resolution of the monitor.

I honestly don't know how the Packaged Arc Graphics Driver for ubuntu works or performs..

but from my own perspective and i have a vega64 to upgrade to an intel GPU makes no sense what so ever.

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-RX-Vega-64-vs-Intel-Arc-A770/3933vsm1850973

userbenchmark claims the intel arc 770 is +27% faster but linux benchmarks with the opensource drivers tells otherwise.
and the Arc-a770 is to slow for raytracing...

so in my point of view intel needs to build much faster gpus or else they compete agaist 5-6 year old hardware like my vega64...

They're competing with the RX 6650 XT and RTX 3060. You can buy a new A770 for $290 which has superior ray tracing performance compared to both the RX 6650 XT and RTX 3060. The RX Vega 64 was a flag ship that cost $600 at launch I would hope it still was useful. Most people don't upgrade hardware for 5 years. Vega lacks many features that Arc supports for example Ray Tracing hardware, Av1, DX12 Ultimate/DirectStorage.

Again Intel takes the win when it comes to DirectStorage: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/di...d-intel-nvidia

https://www.newegg.com/asrock-arc-a7...a770&cm_re=int el_a770-_-14-930-077-_-Product&quicklink=true

For their first gaming series of GPUs they've done a fantastic job. They need to continue ironing out GPU bugs like they've been doing. It's a difficult market to just jump into and so far they've done great. The $350 gpu market is the most used:

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

[pong]

I'm not quite sure if I'll be pleasantly surprised or not when I try ubuntu 23.04 release but I'm really hoping that if they haven't already they (Intel and or ubuntu / debian package maintainers) hurry and make contemporary packages of the whole intel GPU SW ecosystem to support ubuntu 23.04 or let's say being more distribution neutral the state of the ARC drivers etc. in kernel 6.2 + mesa 22.recent-something as would be found in the current ubuntu 23.04 release, current Manjaro, etc.

The reason being that while the i915 and MESA GPU drivers and desktop and such libraries will be supportive of the ARCs well out of the box for a distribution running kernel 6.2.x and contemporary MESA, there's a mountain of other intel GPU support libraries and tools for opencl, ONEAPI cluster of video codec / DNN / VPL, etc. tools, compilers, codecs / video processing, etc. etc. which I think should in many cases benefit to correlate with updates / fixes to be generally contemporary with the newer kernel / MESA / GPU device driver etc. so while one can get a good graphical desktop OOB experience with a new 6.2 kernel / mesa 22.x distro, one also will want to be able to have better than the older 2022-level "we support arc with ubuntu 22.04 LTS" level packages for all the other stuff you probably want to work optimally if you went out of your way to buy ARC for a LINUX box for media / development / desktop use / gaming etc. etc.

Publishing the HW / driver specifications / tools needed to get something like the ms windows "arc control center" with temperature / power / fan / frequency / resolution / monitor signal parameters / LED lighting control etc. control utility for LINUX would also be nice and I think important for a lot of ARC linux users. I've played around a bit with an ARC in manjaro and while I think I can see
the power consumption I don't recall seeing anything much else wrt. obviously easy to get working operational controls / monitoring relating to the GPU vs. what I know is somehow possible wrt. what the MS windows SW does.

[leuc]

LED lighting control

https://openrgb.org/devices_08/Intel-Arc-A770-Limited-Edition.html

and for monitoring

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/igt-gpu-tools/-/blob/master/tools/lsgpu.c

[qarium]

They're competing with the RX 6650 XT and RTX 3060. You can buy a new A770 for $290 which has superior ray tracing performance compared to both the RX 6650 XT and RTX 3060.

the 6650XT is to slow for raytracing
the RTX 3060 is to slow for raytracing
the A770 is to slow for raytracing

so what is the point ? the card has features you simple can not use and in the end you turn of raytracing
and then you end up with Vega64 speed.

The RX Vega 64 was a flag ship that cost $600 at launch I would hope it still was useful. Most people don't upgrade hardware for 5 years. Vega lacks many features that Arc supports for example Ray Tracing hardware, Av1, DX12 Ultimate/DirectStorage.

if your card is to slow for raytracing then the feature raytracing does not count my vega64 can also do raytracing in shaders without hardware acceleration it is to slow so you end up turning off the raytracon.

AV1 decode does not matter if you cpu is fast enough i already use AV1 in youtube and my CPU can handle it easily ...

"DX12 Ultimate/DirectStorage"

i am a linux user so i am not sure what DX12 ultimate means for me.

there is one single feature what would always be nice to have and this is the feature that the cpu can use the RAM of the gpu...

"Microsoft has announced a new DirectX12 GPU optimization feature in conjunction with Resizable-BAR, called GPU Upload Heaps (opens in new tab), that allows the CPU to have direct, simultaneous access to GPU memory."

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/dx12-optimization-cpu-gpu-access-vram-simultaneously

Again Intel takes the win when it comes to DirectStorage: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/di...d-intel-nvidia

Microsoft's DirectStorage 1.1 is a windows feature ??? i am not sure how this would help me with linux ???

https://www.newegg.com/asrock-arc-a7...a770&cm_re=int el_a770-_-14-930-077-_-Product&quicklink=true

Honestly i would never buy the 8gb vram modell... even the 16gb modell is in my point of view not enough vram
modern games need something like 18gb vram... this means not even the 16gb modell fit ... 20 or 24GB is the minium today.
my vega64 already has 8gb vram... thats plain and simple not an upgrade.

and as soon as you want to run a deep learning AI modell on you GPU VRAM is the killer feature because these large models do not fit in gpus with small vram...

For their first gaming series of GPUs they've done a fantastic job.

I totally agree on that not many companies could do the same in the first generation but you know it was not the first generation
there was a 4gb GPU PCIe card before the ARC series ,.. so techncially it is the second generation.

but i agree they did an fantastic job. but honestly they can not beat nvidia and amd can not do in to... means
on the GPU side AMD and Intel should work together ... this will not happen of course but the result is that Nvidia win...

They need to continue ironing out GPU bugs like they've been doing. It's a difficult market to just jump into and so far they've done great. The $350 gpu market is the most used:
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

of course i know more expensive gpus are mostly not used for gaming...

but honestly the next gpu i buy will have 24gb vram or more and will cost over 1000€ and the main goal is to run opensource AI modells on it... Gaming is just a side product for me. i become to old to just do gaming.

[rogerx]

I have not dabbled with the Intel Ubuntu branch of code since install Linux kernel-6.1 on Ubuntu LTS (long term stable) version. Just never worked well for me prior to installing Linux kernel-6.1

I'll just wait for the next Ubuntu LTS version release with default distribution kernel-6.1 or kernel-6.2, or which ever subsequent kernel version is chosen. In the meantime, I'll keep force installing kernel-6.1 every time Ubuntu's updates keeps down-grading the kernel to kernel-5.13 version.

Just easier and less fussing with so many additional required branched package upgrades.