Trying Out Meteor Lake's Arc Graphics With The New Intel Xe Driver Was A Bust

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Trying Out Meteor Lake's Arc Graphics With The New Intel Xe Driver Was A Bust

With Linux 6.8 set to introduce the new Intel Xe experimental kernel graphics driver early next year, last week I ran some Xe vs. i915 driver benchmarks on various Intel Arc Graphics discrete GPUs. There's still room for bettering the performance but a nice initial entry into the kernel and easy to test out. For some Christmas weekend benchmarking I was curious to see how well the Xe kernel driver would work on the integrated graphics side with the new Meteor Lake processors...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-MTL-Xe-Driver-Bust

[ET3D]

A merry benchmark Christmas to you.

[hubick]

Maybe it's working as designed and your eyeballs just aren't HDR enough?

[stormcrow]

Maybe it's working as designed and your eyeballs just aren't HDR enough?

You're probably not far off. It does sound like a HDR/SDR profile mismatch. It's the same problem you get when you have HDR enabled in Windows but the content being rendered is SDR. The system is unable to properly match the SDR content to the HDR expanded contrast and brightness range so you get a blinding white screen with no contrast. This suggests the driver either doesn't have that panel's characteristics in its database, or it's unable to read them from the panel. Even Windows has a lot of trouble with SDR content on HDR panels - play Skyrim on an HDR screen having forgotten to turn off HDR first :P It'll blind you. The only OS that gets it right most of the time is Mac.

That part's a little murky to me - because having to have a database for ALL HDR panels in a driver for every HDR panel variation seems like a very bad design. It should be contained in the EDID or DDC responses for basic visibility. If the panel is not standards compliant, fall back to a safe mode or a known bad panel database. Course it could be it's both non-standard and not in the known non-compliant database. Wouldn't be the first time a laptop had broken/non-standard devices that only function because OEM specific drivers and/or firmware cover it up. This is the reason I recommend to people that listen to only use OEM supplied drivers if at all possible in Windows. The range profile appears to be missing even if the device is otherwise functional. I digress, however, I remember reading that the Steam Deck has to have its HDR OLED panel characteristics preloaded so... :shrug:

[Weasel]

Volta can't wait for your excuse.