Intel Arc B580 Graphics Open-Source Driver Linux Gaming Performance
When taking the geometric mean of all the game tests that ran successfully on all of the graphics cards, the Intel Arc B580 on Linux came out to delivering 1.66x the performance of the prior generation Arc A580 graphics card. Or compared to the prior Arc A770 flagship, the Arc B580 was at 1.45x the performance. Overall though both the GeForce RTX 4060 and Radeon RX 7600 graphics cards were faster than the current Arc B580. It will be interesting to see though what more Battlemage/Xe2 graphics driver optimizations come to the open-source Linux drivers in the coming weeks. But for being a $249 graphics card, the Arc B580 had a nice first showing up against the Radeon RX 7600 that is retailing for around $279 or the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 at around $294.
Making the Intel Arc B580 generational performance even more impressive was looking at the GPU power consumption data for Alchemist vs. Battlemage. On average across all the Linux gaming tests conducted, the Arc B580 had a 140 Watt average compared to the Arc A770 having a 144 Watt average while performing less than the B580 overall. As mentioned the GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card tested didn't have any NVIDIA SMI power monitoring support while on average the Radeon RX 7600 series were consuming less power than the Arc B580.
A concern with the Arc B580 power monitoring is the idle/minimum power use being much higher than the AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards. The AMD RDNA3 and NVIDIA Ada graphics cards could bottom out well under 10 Watts meanwhile the B580 had a minimum power draw of 36 Watts... That's similar to the Intel Arc A-Series that also were consuming 30~40 Watts at a minimum. This was one area I was hoping Intel would have addressed for Battlemage but at least with the launch-day driver support is not.
Hopefully the GPU temperature monitoring gets wired up soon for Battlemage graphics cards on Linux. Then again, it was only this year that Intel GPU temperature monitoring came to Linux at all.
Overall the Intel Arc B580 is delivering great generational improvements over the A580 and typically outperforming the A770 too by wide margins. The power efficiency under load is comparable to AMD RDNA3 and at $249 USD the Intel Arc B580 graphics card does deliver great value.
The open-source Linux driver support at launch for the Intel Arc B-Series is in good shape as long as you don't mind running the latest upstream code of Linux 6.12+ and Mesa 24.3+. It's all upstream and open-source driver code and a much smoother experience than when Intel Arc A-Series launched with a lot of code still pending and not to mention numerous game/driver bugs.
All in at $249 USD the Intel Arc B580 is a promising budget graphics card for Linux users who are after fully open-source and upstream driver support. Now let's continue the Arc B580 Linux testing by looking at the OpenCL / GPU compute performance. Thanks again to Intel for providing an Arc B580 review sample for launch day Linux testing at Phoronix.
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