Intel Arc Graphics A580 On Linux: Open-Source Graphics For Under $200

Last week Intel announced the Arc Graphics A580 as a new mid-range DG2/Alchemist graphics card option that comes in between the entry-level Arc Graphics A380 and the higher-end Arc Graphics A750/A770. With the Arc Graphics A580 coming in at under $200, it's quite an interesting graphics card for those after open-source Linux driver support and/or those wanting to experiment with Intel's growing oneAPI software ecosystem with excellent open-source GPU compute support.

Back when Intel announced the Arc Graphics A580 I was able to order one in-stock for $179 USD. I ended up ordering the ASRock Challenge Arc A580 8GB graphics card that is being used for all of this initial testing of Arc Graphics A580 under Linux. There is also the SPARKLE Intel Arc A580 ORC OC Edition that launched last week as well and coming in at $179 USD. As of writing this article days after launch, both models continue to be available from major Internet retailers for around $179 USD.

Meanwhile the Intel Arc A380 graphics card is currently retailing for around $119 USD while the Arc A750 is going for $219~239 based upon the model and the Arc Graphics A770 for around $299 USD.

The Arc Graphics A580 has 24 Xe cores, 24 ray-tracing units, 1700MHz graphics clock, 8GB of GDDR6 video memory, and a rated total board power of 185 Watts. The Arc Graphics A580 ends up performing much more closely to the A750/A770 than the A380, as the benchmark results will show.

The Arc Graphics A580 has a device PCI ID of 0x56A2. That Intel DG2 0x56A2 device ID has been in the Linux kernel since last year so the out-of-the-box support at launch is in good shape. With the A580 being a mid-range product between the A380 and A750/A770, there isn't much to worry about when it comes to the Linux driver support compared to the existing level of DG2/Alchemist support.

The ASRock Challenger A580 was running just fine on an upstream Linux kernel and Mesa graphics driver stack. Of course, for best performance it's recommended to be riding the very newest open-source graphics driver code. For the purposes of this benchmarking all tests were done on Linux 6.6-rc5 and Mesa 23.3-devel but using older components is fine too.

In this initial A580 article is a look at the Arc Graphics A380 / A680 / A750 / A770 across a wide range of Linux gaming tests as well as GPU compute benchmarks using OpenCL and oneAPI/SYCL. A number of the new oneAPI tests are added to make things interesting.

In a follow-up article in the next week or so will be benchmarks showing how the Arc Graphics products now compare to the latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards under Linux. As usual, all the GPUs are freshly being re-tested on the latest Linux software so just for today is purely the newest Arc Graphics numbers on Linux with Ubuntu 23.10.