Intel Arc Graphics A750 + A770 Are Ready To Run On Open-Source Linux Drivers

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 30 September 2022 at 09:02 AM EDT. 28 Comments
INTEL
This week was word of the Intel Arc Graphics A770 launching for $329+ on 12 October, yesterday was the embargo lift on the Arc Graphics A750 also shipping on 12 Ocrober for $289+, and now today is another embargo lift concerning Intel Arc Graphics...


Today's embargo lift on the graphics side for Intel's busy Innovation week is the "unboxing" embargo for the Arc Graphics A750/A770. Thus allowed to share what the graphics card and press packaging looks like and in turn ultimately confirming the hardware has arrived. Yep, the Arc Graphics A750 and A770 are already at Phoronix for Linux testing!


Thus here is what the Arc Graphics A750 and A770 desktop graphics cards look like in the flesh. But as usual for the "unboxing" embargoes, I can't actually share any benchmarks or other revealing details yet -- stay tuned for October.


But I can reiterate what I have previously reported on based on my close tracking of Mesa and Linux kernel developments as well as from my existing Arc Graphics A380 Linux testing: the Arc Graphics A750 and A770 run on open-source, upstream Linux drivers. Expect the situation to play out roughly as what I outlined in Intel Arc Graphics Running On Fully Open-Source Linux Driver. For upstream, open-source support look for Linux 6.0+, Mesa 22.2+, and the recent linux-firmware.git for the necessary GuC firmware. Intel's Compute-Runtime for OpenCL and Level Zero also has already fully open-source and working DG2/Alchemist support as previously covered.


As outlined in that prior A380 testing article, the DG2/Alchemist desktop graphics cards are still tucked behind a module option to indicate its "experimental" status, but if setting that option, there is accelerated DG2/Alchemist open-source support right now. Thankfully Linux 6.0 stable is due out this weekend, ahead of the 12 October official launch. As I usually recommend for any new GPU launches when using the open-source drivers: the newer Mesa, the better. Riding Mesa Git would certainly be recommended considering Mesa 22.3 won't be out as stable until December, but as I have reported in prior articles there continues to be a lot of OpenGL and Vulkan driver improvements landing. Just earlier this week was enabling the Vulkan ray-tracing support with their ANV driver. So while Mesa 22.2 stable may work for the Arc Graphics 7 series, using Mesa 22.3-devel will yield more features and likely better performance too. But stay tuned for my full Arc Graphics A750/A770 Linux review for more details.


When the vendor knowingly sends out timely hardware review samples to Phoronix knowing full well it's exclusively focusing on Linux testing, that's also a good sign about the expected Linux support by the hardware vendor.


From my initial hands on with the Arc Graphics A750/A770 cards, they are built well especially for their $349 or less pricing. At least for these Intel-built "Limited Edition" cards, we'll see what Intel's AIB partners end up coming with for A750 and A770 card designs.


As a reminder on these card specs:


The Intel Arc A Graphics A750/A770 aim to compete with the GeForce RTX 3060 series level graphics processors. Unlike NVIDIA, Intel's Linux drivers are fully open-source for both the kernel and user-space components. NVIDIA is making progress on the open-source kernel driver side albeit will likely be a while before anything worthwhile is upstream and there hasn't been any activity by them on an official open-source OpenGL/Vulkan user-space drivers. Going up against NVIDIA's walled CUDA garden is also the fully open-source Intel oneAPI software ecosystem.

So this is what these competitively-priced Intel Arc graphics cards look like and stay tuned for a busy and exciting October.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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