Intel Arc Graphics Driver Change Leads To A Big Speed-Up Under Linux

[spiral_23]

Your motherboard needs the appropriate ASPM settings exposed in BIOS/UEFI. You also can't have a fancy display or several not-so-fancy displays. I'm on triple 1440p@165 so I was SOL.

# of Displays	Can Arc A-Series enter the low power state when idle?
1	Yes, up to 4k@60
2	Yes, up to 1080p@60
3	No
4	No

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us.../graphics.html

are those settings just for windows or also for linux? because the description its just for windows.

[Danny3]

I wish they would care about HDR that much too!
KDE developers trying to implement HDR in Plasma have problems with both AMD and Intel drivers not implementing HDR requirements fully / correctly.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

are those settings just for windows or also for linux? because the description its just for windows.

I was seeing high idle consumption in Linux too. Maybe this is better lately though...

https://www.techpowerup.com/305495/intel-quietly-fixes-high-multi-monitor-power-draw-of-arc-gpus

[RejectModernity]

are those settings just for windows or also for linux? because the description its just for windows.

Those settings in bios allow your card to sleep, it doesn't matter linux or windows. Perhaps you need to enable ASPM and/or some energy saving thingy in Linux, because in windows you need to do so.

[coder]

Has the idle power usage issue been resolved yet? e.g. it not consuming 40W in idle?

Didn't they say that will require a hardware change? That's one of the reasons I'm waiting for Alchemist Refresh, which should be announced in Q3 and presumably ship in Q4. Possibly timed to coincide with Raptor Lake Refresh.

"Intel's Arc has been out for almost a year and there are reports that an Alchemist refresh in the form of Alchemist+ is in the works. This would mark an intermediate solution before the company shifts to the more high-end Battlemage GPUs in 2024."

https://wccftech.com/intel-to-host-i...mist-expected/

[Quackdoc]

I wish they would care about HDR that much too!
KDE developers trying to implement HDR in Plasma have problems with both AMD and Intel drivers not implementing HDR requirements fully / correctly.

is this an intel/AMD thing or a mesa thing? curious since HDR works fine for me on a polaris RX580 using mpv and amdvlk

[rob-tech]

I'm not impressed with ARC, the drivers are buggy and barely usable in certain scenarios and the GPUs are slow with no proper high end offering. I hope they continue with their efforts and do become a competitor to AMD and Nvidia instead of just giving up though.

[lyamc]

I'm not impressed with ARC, the drivers are buggy and barely usable in certain scenarios and the GPUs are slow with no proper high end offering. I hope they continue with their efforts and do become a competitor to AMD and Nvidia instead of just giving up though.

I'm impressed at the performance at the price point and the overall driver performance considering that these are brand new GPUs.

I'm just disappointed at the lack of driver support for a) playing games, or b) encoding videos. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/x...l/-/issues/234

My plan was to record or stream gaming (Xe driver) in AV1 (i915 driver). What a waste of potential.

[Quackdoc]

I'm impressed at the performance at the price point and the overall driver performance considering that these are brand new GPUs.

I'm just disappointed at the lack of driver support for a) playing games, or b) encoding videos. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/x...l/-/issues/234

My plan was to record or stream gaming (Xe driver) in AV1 (i915 driver). What a waste of potential.

it was shown earlier that the intel devs didn't realize how important VM_BIND was for games. IMO it's probably will be re-evaluated sooner or later, but I doubt it's a priorty for them at this point, still plenty of other issues that are likely much higher priority.

from sdutt:

Can you please share the titles on steam which are not starting with i915 either here or in a separate bug? We will triage/investigate whether the issue is due to lack of VM_BIND in i915 or something else.

that being said, I stand by what I said earlier, i think intel is doing a good job, but until VM_BIND for i915 or HUC is in XE, no one should be buying a DG2 for "normal use" im lucky since I game on an rx580, so I can encode perfectly fine. and so far this is a pretty well supported usecase.

EDIT: I say well supported but I do run a custom ffmpeg build with own tooling, no idea how well OBS and stuff works.

[Danny3]

is this an intel/AMD thing or a mesa thing? curious since HDR works fine for me on a polaris RX580 using mpv and amdvlk

It's both an Intel and AMD thing.
I'm not sure if it's a Mesa thing also.
It's about KDE developers trying to implement HDR on Linux by adding support to Plasma.
They have discovered that AMD doesn't support the "Colorspace" property:

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/4044

And a developer replied somewhere that while Intel supports it, YCbCr is broken, so no vendor has a correct / full implementation of HDR support in their driver.
So I'm not sure why KDE needs this colorspace supported and in whay way is broken, but Intel should fix it.
Nobody can go forward with full / correct HDR implementation if that' not the same in the drivers.