Intel Scores Another Nice Arc Graphics Boost On Linux For Summer 2023

[Ramalama]

First of all - there is no reason to reply unfriendly - so behave.

Second I guess you havent understood my post.

You wrote:
for inventor you dont need a beefy GPU.
Im refering to this point.

If you would have made an example with Excel i do agree.
But if you seriously use CAD Software you do need a proper GPU (and a lot of RAM which you havent mentioned yet). Hence requesting a laptop with strong CPU but no dGPU for this purpose is based on a wrong assumption. Or you have picked an unsuitable example based on your corner case.
My professional background is partially mechanical engineering. So i have extensively used CAD/FEM systems at university and later also in the Industry. And once you do real engineering work your Intel igpu is not sufficient.

In addition to this Im assuming you are concluding your false base of argument by an underestimation of required performance for rendering simple assemblies in CAD. You can not asses it with the gameing POV. The engines are totally different. So assuming it does not look like cyberpunk = I don't need a beefy GPU is false. This is the only "reasonable" argument which explains to me how you came up with your conclusion in the first place.

Considering Raytraying. Yes this is not very well implemented in CAD software because it is only needed if a marketing guy comes over and needs a nice pic for product advertisment or if some management guy needs it for a fancy presentation to convince another beancounter higher up the ladder.

I do daily constructions with inventor and im using the software since 2007. Basically we are now at inventor 2024.1
i used a lot fusion either, since it's very similar...
Hell i even used Solid works, but mainly for calculating airflow.
And im working as an engineer + system admin, it's a bit complicated to describe my job, however im mainly constructing for the german rail company.
Had even whole rails with over a million of parts.

None of the programs mentioned need a "good" or beefy gpu, something like the integrated graphics is more as enough.
What i usually need is basically only a really beefy CPU and a lot of fast memory. That's why we usually go for workstations with quad channel memory, only for the bandwidth.

I don't know with what you're constructing, but it sounds like you're doing something with Blender or similar software?

However, one point is correct, getting unfriendly isn't really necessary, since the web or all kind of forums have enough trolls and i don't want to be one :-)

Cheers

[CochainComplex]

I do daily constructions with inventor and im using the software since 2007. Basically we are now at inventor 2024.1
i used a lot fusion either, since it's very similar...
Hell i even used Solid works, but mainly for calculating airflow.
And im working as an engineer + system admin, it's a bit complicated to describe my job, however im mainly constructing for the german rail company.
Had even whole rails with over a million of parts.

None of the programs mentioned need a "good" or beefy gpu, something like the integrated graphics is more as enough.
What i usually need is basically only a really beefy CPU and a lot of fast memory. That's why we usually go for workstations with quad channel memory, only for the bandwidth.

I don't know with what you're constructing, but it sounds like you're doing something with Blender or similar software?

However, one point is correct, getting unfriendly isn't really necessary, since the web or all kind of forums have enough trolls and i don't want to be one :-)

Cheers

Ok glad to see that we are back on common ground .

I have been working for german car manufacturer and now im working as physicist (the other part of my professional background)
for a large european particle accelerator facility (not CERN).

My experience is mainly based on CATIA, Inventor, (FreeCAD, EAGLE and KiCAD) in in combination with ANSYS (Flotran), COMSOL, OpenFOAM@HPC....
also some free tools like ELMER, Salome...
The majority of time mostly CATIA but my hands-on involvement has been reduced in the last couple of years.

Currently the demanding stuff even for GPUs are assemblies of the accelerator structure.
Or subcomponents.This sounds fancy but considering how geometrically interesting a washing machine is with injection
molded honeycomb girder structures it will hold true for a lot of other assemblies with less "fancy sounding background" - at the end it boils down to the geomertries involved and not the physics.
Once you want to highlight a chain of parts in transparent view of a larger assembly you can see how the machine is crunching polygons.*

But I have to admit FreeCAD is a good example where you have a not so well optimized multithreading environment.
Hence quite a lot of single core performance is requiered. I was once using it due to the lack of sufficient CATIA Licenses.
It didn't like large objects with strange aspect ratio. Recompiling it with aggressive Compiler Flags and also recompiling OpenCASCADE to make a more efficient use of the architecture...didn't really help a lot.

As a hobbiest with some KiCAD to PCB and FreeCAD to 3D Printer tasks a strong GPU is not required.
In the professional field you don't only want a convincing rendering you want a rendering with high accuracy to see overlapping geometries or intersection ones. Especially in the end assembly. This requires a lot gpu performance without shortcuts.

*btw here is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8bL5fbv5sI a CATIA Tutorial how to reduce the "GFX settings" for large assemblies. Some of them will also reduce the CPU demand but a lot of them are pure GPU. You can see some of the tricks/hacks which are common in games but due to precission requierements not default in CAD which can be enabled for large assemblies to increase the performance like occlusion culling.

[Ramalama]

Ok glad to see that we are back on common ground .

I have been working for german car manufacturer and now im working as physicist (the other part of my professional background)
for a large european particle accelerator facility (not CERN).

My experience is mainly based on CATIA, Inventor, (FreeCAD, EAGLE and KiCAD) in in combination with ANSYS (Flotran), COMSOL, OpenFOAM@HPC....
also some free tools like ELMER, Salome...
Mainly CATIA - used it at University, Carcompany and now here aswell. but my hands-on involvement has been reduced in the last couple of years.

Currently the demanding stuff even for GPUs are assemblies of the accelerator structure.
Or subcomponents.This sounds fancy but considering how geometrically interesting a washing machine is with injection
molded honeycomb girder structures it will hold true for a lot of other assemblies with less "fancy sounding background" - at the end it boils down to the geomertries involved and not the physics.
Once you want to highlight a chain of parts in transparent view of a larger assembly you can see how the machine is crunching polygons.

But I have to admit FreeCAD is a good example where you have a not so well optimized multithreading environment.
Hence quite a lot of single core performance is requiered. I was once using it due to the lack of sufficient CATIA Licenses.
It didn't like large objects with strange aspect ratio. Recompiling it with aggressive Compiler Flags and also recompiling OpenCASCADE to make a more
efficient use of the architecture...didn't really help a lot.

Okay, injection molding with very complex geometry may require indeed GPU, but i tbh forgot about transparent objects, because i rarely work with them :-)
Once a while it's just a glasplate/plastic part, once i had a window, but tbh, most of the time i don't even apply the transparent "overlay" to that parts, i work then simply in the cutted view, as you can't select anything behind your transparent part anyway (with the mouse) :-)

Catia is a hell of a different software, i tryed it once and understood nothing xD

FreeCAD, hell, it has great features, but the UI is made by someone that never constructed anything.
I don't like freecad only because it's extremely unintuitive:-)
But i don't even remember or checked if the GPU is used.

However, my work computer has an Radeon 6950xt and had before an GeForce 1080ti, both cards are pretty useless.
I worked with an RTX a4500 (for 1,5 weeks till i returned it back), it literally made no difference in inventor, that's why i bought an 6950 in the end.
(Cause if i want to Play once at least + cheaper)

however, i actually never worked on an igpu only computer, but tbh, for me at least, it will make no difference either, im pretty sure.

The only thing i really need, is a beefier CPU...
An i9-10990xe (x299), is at the limits here extremely often...
And i do sometimes Ray tracing for pictures/presentations either, but glad god not thaat often, otherwise i would have switched already to something like high clocked xeons, with 32 cores at least.
Inventor utilizes the cpu actually pretty good if it comes to multithreading, not every task but nearly every.

However long story short, that's all off topic 😂

Wish you a good day :-)

[andrei_me]

It's increasingly hard to find a decent laptop without a discrete GPU nowadays. Hence, why I wish there was a switch to turn them off. Manufacturers should put an option in the BIOS to completely disable them.

Well, Framework Laptop 16 fits this, although only available next year and not as cheap as other options

[Calinou]

Depends on what you want? I've bought a 14" Asus a while ago which is 6900HX only - no dGPU. Can handle older games without issues, even at native res (2880x1800) which I have to admit shocked me quite a bit. Newer things still do very well if I turn the res down. My biggest complaint is that for some bizarre reason, I cannot get 1440x900 working at all (which would be the ideal "step down" res for gaming)... the custom resolution options so touted by AMD is flat out missing in the Radeon application, and if I add it through custom .inf trickery, Windows just refuses to list it.

Look into IntegerScaler

[cjcox]

I wouldn't say "pretty lousy", it's more like not very well optimized.

(note: myriad of stuff about AMD and Nvida removed)

Do you own an Arc and used it when released on a Linux distribution?

[Ramalama]

Do you own an Arc and used it when released on a Linux distribution?

I own an Arc a380, build into my Server since Proxmox 7.4.
That was starting with the opt-in kernel 6.1 (which had no arc support)

Surely it was a pain to bring it to Life!

But since Kernel 6.2 i couldn't be happier with that card.
And we are at "now" not the past.

Sure it was a pain in the past, but now we have at least Kernel 6.2 or newer available and it's just a breeze to get an Arc perfectly working, since it's supported ootb without any drivers.

And sure, the Arc is a utterly horrible card for almost everyone, but for Proxmox or other linux distributions with kernels 6.2 and above, for the usecase as jellyfin/Plex hardware acceleration, or Video converting, hell there is even an sr-iov driver available, where you can spread one Arc to multiple VM's for hardware accelerated desktop, this card is just amazing.

The start was hard, sure, but now this card changed 180degrees on Linux, for the better.