Intel Highlights Their Progress On Arc Graphics Drivers Since Launch

Intel this week held a presentation to talk up the progress they've made on their (Windows) graphics driver since launch for Arc Graphics where for many games there are double digit performance improvements to enjoy with the budget-friendly Arc Graphics A750 and A770 graphics cards.

Intel's presentation was, of course, centered around Windows gaming... But I figured I'd share some highlights anyhow and it makes for some interesting forum discussions. With their emphasis on Direct3D 9 games enjoying much better performance, it's also thanks to Intel moving to make use of DXVK on Windows for leveraging their Vulkan driver to enjoy better performance.

Also notable is Intel now lowering the Arc Graphics A750 pricing to just $249 USD, a $40 drop compared to prior pricing.

Since launching the Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics cards last year, there's no disputing that Intel has been focusing a lot of engineering resources on improving their drivers -- both for Windows and Linux. There were a number of caveats to their support at launch but those have been largely worked out in the past few months.

While not part of the Intel gaming presentation this week, on the Linux side the experience has been much smoother as I've covered across numerous Phoronix articles. It's with the Linux 6.2 cycle where the DG2/Alchemist support is now treated as stable and enabled by default to no longer require any module parameter workaround to activate the support. With Mesa 23.0 and 23.1-devel there are also more performance optimizations to find with the open-source Arc Graphics support on Linux for OpenGL and Vulkan.

There still are Arc Graphics issues with some games due to missing Vulkan API features by the ANV driver, so hopefully Intel engineers will get those lingering items addressed to make for a nicer Steam Play Linux gaming experience. From earlier in January see my articles on AMD Radeon vs. Intel Arc Graphics With Linux 6.2 + Mesa 23.0 and Intel Arc Graphics A770: Windows 11 vs. Linux Benchmarks.

In a few weeks when the Linux 6.3 cycle gets going and more new material has accumulated in Mesa 23.1 Git, I'll be around with some fresh Arc Graphics A750/A770 benchmarks on Linux for those interested. But long story short, Intel is just trying to get the message out today that their Windows driver (and Linux) support has made significant strides already since launch day.