Intel Arc Graphics A770: Windows 11 vs. Linux Benchmarks

Following the year-end looks at Windows 11 vs. Linux graphics/gaming performance for AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, today's article is my first look at the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance for Intel Arc Graphics with the flagship A770 graphics card.

Today's article is out first time looking at the Arc Graphics A770 under Windows and Linux with the same hardware and games under test. Additionally, it was my first time even using Arc Graphics with Microsoft Windows. The Intel Arc Graphics on Windows 11 was a smooth experience and less worrisome than with the current open-source graphics driver where there were rendering issues for some games and some games still having issues running on the Mesa ANV Vulkan driver.

On the Windows side the Intel 31.0.101.3975 driver from Intel.com as the latest available at the time of testing was used atop Windows 11 Pro. On the Linux side was an Ubuntu 22.10 base while manually upgrading to Linux 6.2 Git and Mesa 23.0-devel Git. Mesa 23.0-devel was obtained from the Oibaf PPA for the very latest Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan drivers for the A770. With the in-development Linux 6.2 kernel is where the DG2/Alchemist discrete GPUs from Intel are now treated as stable and enabled by default, along with having various DG2 improvements in that very latest kernel code.

The same Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" test system was used for this Windows 11 and Linux testing of the Arc Graphics A770.