AMD Radeon vs. Intel Arc Graphics With Linux 6.2 + Mesa 23.0

Following the Windows vs. Linux benchmarks with Intel Arc Graphics from last week, in today's article is a look at how the Intel Arc Graphics A750 and A770 are competing to the AMD Radeon graphics when using the very latest Linux 6.2 kernel along with Mesa 23.0-devel for providing the very latest open-source graphics driver support from each vendor.

Today's benchmarking battle is making use of Linux 6.2 and Mesa 23.0-devel, both in their development states as of last week, atop an Ubuntu 22.10 host while using an Intel Core i9 13900K desktop. The graphics cards featured in this article include:

- Intel Arc Graphics A750
- Intel Arc Graphics A770
- AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT
- AMD Radeon RX 6600
- AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT
- AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT

The AMD graphics cards chosen for those being relevant to the A750/A770 class performance. Just AMD and Intel graphics were tested in looking at the open-source Linux graphics performance in that being of most interest to enthusiasts/gamers and the NVIDIA proprietary driver not yet having Linux 6.2 support.

Besides more fixes for both AMD and Intel with Linux 6.2, the Linux 6.2 kernel is a big deal on the Arc Graphics (DG2/Alchemist) front. Finally with Linux 6.2 the Intel Arc Graphics are enabled by default so no special kernel flags are needed to activate the support in that it's officially promoted to stable. With Linux 6.2 there is also finally HWMON power monitoring support for exposing the energy use of the DG2-class Intel GPUs under Linux. Thus this is also our first time being able to look at the Intel Arc Graphics power consumption under Linux relative to the AMD RDNA2 competition.

From there a wide variety of graphics tests and gaming benchmarks were conducted for these mid-range cards -- both native Linux games as well as Windows games running on Linux via Steam Play.