Intel Arc Graphics See Faster Performance On Ubuntu 23.10

For those using the stock kernel and Mesa drivers when running Ubuntu Linux, the upgrade from Ubuntu 23.04 to the newly-released Ubuntu 23.10 can mean some nice graphics performance improvements for Intel Arc Graphics users. Here is a look at some Arc Graphics A770 benchmarks on Ubuntu 23.04 to 23.10 plus the gains that are coming up when moving to Linux 6.6 and Mesa 23.3-devel.

Similar to the open-source AMD graphics improvements when moving to a newer Linux distribution release (or upgrading your Linux kernel and Mesa otherwise), Intel graphics with their open-source and upstream drivers typically enjoy performance boosts too in addition to new OpenGL and Vulkan extensions, game fixes, and other improvements. These open-source Intel driver improvements are all the more apparent these days with their discrete Arc Graphics hardware.

For today's article I ran some benchmarks looking at the out-of-the-box performance of the Arc Graphics A770 on Ubuntu 23.04 (Linux 6.2 + Mesa 23.0) to that of the new Ubuntu 23.10 with Linux 6.5 and Mesa 23.2. Plus a third run was done while using Ubuntu 23.10 and upgrading to Linux 6.6-rc5 via the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA and also enabling the Oibaf PPA for a Mesa 23.3-devel build of the latest Intel Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers.

In addition to looking at the OpenGL and Vulkan graphics performance, some OpenCL benchmarks were also carried out while using the intel-opencl-icd package on each Ubuntu Linux release. This is quite a straight-forward comparison looking at how the Intel Arc Graphics performance has evolved over the past six months for Ubuntu users as well as what's on the horizon with the latest development code. That development code plus improvements expected over the next few months will in turn be worked into the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release in April of next year.