Intel Arc B580 Delivers Promising Linux GPU Compute Potential For Battlemage

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Arc B580 Delivers Promising Linux GPU Compute Potential For Battlemage

Now that the initial Intel Arc B580 graphics card gaming review on Linux is out, for productivity-minded users you may be more curious about the GPU compute potential... Here are some initial OpenCL and Level Zero results for the Intel Arc B580 graphics card compared to the Intel Arc A-Series and the AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce competition under Linux.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-gpu-compute

[Anux]

I don't know besides the FP16S stuff it is all over the place. Bad drivers once again?

[L_A_G]

I was hoping there'd be a benchmark on AV1 encoding. Having hardware AV1 encoding (Nvidia didn't introduce this until the 4000-series, AMD until the 7000-series) is was convinced me to go out and get an A580. However it may just be for naught as the last AV1 encoding benchmark Phoronix showed everyone was just targeting 4k60 performance and so all the cards tested were at or within spitting distance of it.

[Beryesa]

I hope they figure out the bugs since ROCm doesn't even try, like come on amd! Soon you won't have the open drivers advantage either.

[ms178]

I am surprised, apart from some odd results, this looks very impressive for a 250 USD card.

[flower]

I was hoping there'd be a benchmark on AV1 encoding. Having hardware AV1 encoding (Nvidia didn't introduce this until the 4000-series, AMD until the 7000-series) is was convinced me to go out and get an A580. However it may just be for naught as the last AV1 encoding benchmark Phoronix showed everyone was just targeting 4k60 performance and so all the cards tested were at or within spitting distance of it.

LTT had an AV1 performance comparsion between A770 vs B580. It seems roughly double the performance.
I still use the A380 in my NAS and it is reasonably fast so I dont see a reason to upgrade.

[Svyatko]

I don't know besides the FP16S stuff it is all over the place. Bad drivers once again?

Big internal HW changes to better fit games, needs rework for GPGPU.

[sophisticles]

I was hoping there'd be a benchmark on AV1 encoding. Having hardware AV1 encoding (Nvidia didn't introduce this until the 4000-series, AMD until the 7000-series) is was convinced me to go out and get an A580. However it may just be for naught as the last AV1 encoding benchmark Phoronix showed everyone was just targeting 4k60 performance and so all the cards tested were at or within spitting distance of it.

With video encoding quality is more important than performance, so long as performance isn't so abysmal as to be unusable slow.

Intel is capable of 10-bit AV1 encoding via QSV+ffmpeg and as I mentioned in the other thread, it can do RGBA MJPEG which is great for DI.

Intel also has a new adaptive video sharpening filter and they have a detail enhancement filter that I have tried and is quite good.

[L_A_G]

LTT had an AV1 performance comparsion between A770 vs B580. It seems roughly double the performance.
I still use the A380 in my NAS and it is reasonably fast so I dont see a reason to upgrade.

Having been familiar with LTT from the early days of Youtube I really wouldn't place much stock in a guy who barely knows his ass from his elbow and is only successful because he started early. Especially when the guy's promoted more scientifically illiterate crap than I can count (stuff like wireless power products with sub 5% efficiency).

[DiamondAngle]

The A series had 2 major issues makeing them essentally fully useless for compute

1. the llvm compiler backend was _terrible_ deeply branched code
2. intel A series cards can only access 4GB vram at a time and have to use bank switching to access more than that, every time they switch banks they have to flush some registers makeing working with datasets more than 4GB so slow that you can just forget about general compute.
3. due to 2. you could not allocate buffers >4gb in size without some trickery that also tanked performance.


I wonder if intel B series fixes these issues.