Windows 11 vs. Linux Benchmarks For Intel Arc B-Series "Battlemage" Shows Strengths & Weaknesses

When testing Blender 4.3 with the Intel oneAPI acceleration, Linux was faster than Windows for the Intel Arc A580 and Arc A770 but the tables were turned with the new Arc B580... Windows was delivering the fastest render times on Battlemage. For both Windows and Linux were also cases of the Arc B580 Blender performance being slower than the prior-gen Arc A580.

For some Vulkan compute workloads meanwhile the Intel open-source ANV driver on Linux was looking pretty good.

For the VkFFT Vulkan compute tests the results between both operating systems / drivers were mixed.

When taking the geometric mean of the wide mix of graphics and GPU compute workloads tested on both operating systems, the outcome is quite interesting. The Linux performance for the Alchemist-based Arc A580 and A770 were faster on Linux than Windows in part due to all of the OpenGL benchmarks and such, but for the new Arc B580 the better performance is on Windows 11 with Intel's latest Windows driver. It's nice that there is upstream open-source Intel graphics driver support for Battlemage on launch day, but there is still more room for better optimizing the Intel Xe2/Battlemage Linux graphics driver support. It should be interesting to re-visit this in the weeks/months ahead to see if the Intel open-source software engineers are able to close the gap for Battlemage.