Intel Arc Graphics Show Good Potential For Linux Workstation OpenGL Performance

Recently I provided a fresh look at the Intel Arc Graphics Linux gaming performance with the newest open-source drivers. While it was a letdown with some of the newer Steam Play games still not working due to current limitations of the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver and some Vulkan performance issues in other titles, one area that stood out was the very good Linux OpenGL performance. That made me curious to look at the workstation OpenGL performance for Intel Arc Graphics, which is the focus of today's testing.

With the Intel Arc Graphics performing so well on Linux with their open-source Iris Gallium3D driver for OpenGL support across older games, open-source games still limited to OpenGL, and various OpenGL benchmarks, I was curious to explore the workstation OpenGL performance on Arc Graphics with this maturing driver stack.

Today's benchmarking is centered around the well known SPECViewPerf 2020 v3.0, which last year was finally released for Linux, as well as ParaView. The ParaView software may be less known to some Phoronix readers but is an excellent multi-platform application for interactive, scientific visualizations and data analysis. ParaView is a wonderful visualization engine and its benchmark support is useful.

This round of testing was on an Ubuntu 23.04 snapshot while manually upgrading to the Linux 6.2 kernel. The Intel Arc and AMD Radeon graphics cards were tested using a Mesa 23.1-devel snapshot from this week using the Oibaf PPA. The NVIDIA testing was using their new NVIDIA 530.41.03 Linux driver release.

The graphics cards for this brief workstation comparison included the Intel Arc Graphics A380, A750, and A770 while on the AMD Radeon side was the Radeon RX 6400, RX 6500 XT, RX 6600, and RX 6600 XT graphics cards. On the NVIDIA side was just the GeForce RTX 3060, due to the NVIDIA driver limiting the performance of GeForce hardware for workstation use.