Intel Arc Linux Gaming Performance Boosted by Vastly Improved Vulkan Drivers

[T0@st]

Intel's Alchemist engineering team has been working on improving its open-source Vulkan drivers for Linux—recent coverage from Phoronix shows that Team Blue's hard work is paying off, especially in the area of gaming performance. The site's founder, Michael Larabel, approves of the latest Mesa work produced by Intel engineers, and has commended them on their efforts to better the Arc Graphics family. His mid-month testings—on a Linux 6.4-based system running an Intel Arc A770 GPU—demonstrated a "~10% speed-up for the Intel Arc Graphics on Linux." He has benchmarked this system again over the past weekend, following the release of a new set of optimizations for Mesa 23.3-devel: "The latest performance boost for Intel graphics on Linux is by supporting the I915_FORMAT_MOD_4_TILED_DG2_RC_CCS modifier. Indeed it's panning out nicely for furthering the Intel Arc Graphics Vulkan performance."

He apologized for the limited selection of games, due to: "the Intel Linux graphics driver still not having sparse support in place, but at least that will hopefully be here in the coming months when the Intel Xe kernel driver is upstreamed. Another recent promising development for the Intel open-source graphics driver support is fake sparse support to at least help some games and that code will hopefully be merged soon." First up was Counter-Strike: Global Offensive—thanks to the optimized Vulkan drivers it: "enjoyed another nice boost to the performance as a result of this latest code. For CS Linux gamers, it's great seeing the 21% boost just over the past month."




He observed that: "the performance difference with Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam Play with the Intel Arc Graphics A770 was minimally impacted by this recent Intel ANV driver work."



Larabel concluded: "The biggest gain from the Intel ANV Mesa code in the past week was found with the VKMark Vulkan benchmark cases...Huge improvements over the prior Mesa state albeit is a rather synthetic test case. In any event it's great seeing this latest round of optimizing benefit Intel's open-source Vulkan driver following the more broad performance work in the prior round. Paired with the forthcoming fake sparse support, hopefully seeing the Intel Xe kernel driver merged at least experimentally hopefully later this year, and other ongoing Intel Mesa optimizing, it's an exciting summer to be using Intel Arc Graphics hardware with this open-source driver stack."

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[TumbleGeorge]

Fine wine "Arc".

 

[MachineLearning]

Fine wine "Arc".

The raw silicon is way more powerful than how it currently performs in games. See synthetic DX12 benches, where A770 can beat 6700XT. In games (for now) it's closer to 6650XT/6600XT.

u-9600`s 3DMark - Time Spy (GPU) score: 14979 marks with a Radeon RX 6700 XT

The Radeon RX 6700 XT @ 2950/2150MHzscores getScoreFormatted in the 3DMark - Time Spy (GPU) benchmark. u-9600ranks #258 worldwide and #1 in the hardware class. Find out more at HWBOT.

hwbot.org

stn1`s 3DMark - Time Spy (GPU) score: 15243 marks with a Arc A770

The Arc A770scores getScoreFormatted in the 3DMark - Time Spy (GPU) benchmark. stn1ranks #256 worldwide and #5 in the hardware class. Find out more at HWBOT.

hwbot.org

This is reflected in die size and transistor count, both of which don't make sense when looking at current gaming perf. but not Time Spy, etc.
Should only be up from here as long as the driver team keeps going

 

[wNotyarD]

Fine wine "Arc".

FineWine™ is no longer exclusive to Radeon, it seems.

 

[Assimilator]

A 10% performance improvement.

In CS: GO.

A game that uses an engine older than most peoples' memories.

On Linux.

An operating system renowned for gaming.

Yeah, this is super newsworthy.

The raw silicon is way more powerful than how it currently performs in games. See synthetic DX12 benches, where A770 can beat 6700XT. In games (for now) it's closer to 6650XT/6600XT.

u-9600`s 3DMark - Time Spy (GPU) score: 14979 marks with a Radeon RX 6700 XT

The Radeon RX 6700 XT @ 2950/2150MHzscores getScoreFormatted in the 3DMark - Time Spy (GPU) benchmark. u-9600ranks #258 worldwide and #1 in the hardware class. Find out more at HWBOT.

hwbot.org

stn1`s 3DMark - Time Spy (GPU) score: 15243 marks with a Arc A770

The Arc A770scores getScoreFormatted in the 3DMark - Time Spy (GPU) benchmark. stn1ranks #256 worldwide and #5 in the hardware class. Find out more at HWBOT.

hwbot.org

This is reflected in die size and transistor count, both of which don't make sense when looking at current gaming perf. but not Time Spy, etc.
Should only be up from here as long as the driver team keeps going

Nobody with at least one functional brain cell gives a s**t about synthetics, or how the silicon might perform in 25 years when the drivers are finally finished.

Fine wine "Arc".

It's fine something... something a little browner and smellier than wine, methinks.

 

[Squared]

I was excited and about to download this new driver for my Pop!_OS laptop, but then I remembered you can't just download drivers on Linux. As the article says, these new features will go into the Linux kernel and I suppose we'll get to start using them sometime next year. This is one reason why it's hard to recommend Linux for gaming. I think it's also why SteamOS is now based on Arch Linux, because Arch will be the first distro to adopt a new Linux kernel.

 

[Solaris17]

I was excited and about to download this new driver for my Pop!_OS laptop, but then I remembered you can't just download drivers on Linux. As the article says, these new features will go into the Linux kernel and I suppose we'll get to start using them sometime next year. This is one reason why it's hard to recommend Linux for gaming. I think it's also why SteamOS is now based on Arch Linux, because Arch will be the first distro to adopt a new Linux kernel.

IDK I am running 6.5-rc2 and you can install the mesa drivers manually no problem. So im not sure how accurate this post is literally at all. For an arch /flex I hope your not using it given how painfully simple it is to add the repo's for bleeding edge mesa.

Also for everyone else. 6.2 or maybe even 3? is baseline for 23/04 and 6.5 was confirmed for 23.10 though since popOS runs behind I guess you will be stuck with every other ubuntu flavor instead.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

 

[Squared]

IDK I am running 6.5-rc2 and you can install the mesa drivers manually no problem. So im not sure how accurate this post is literally at all. For an arch /flex I hope your not using it given how painfully simple it is to add the repo's for bleeding edge mesa.

I honestly have almost no idea what mesa is. It sounds like I have some homework to do. Thanks for the info.

 

[GoldenX]

I honestly have almost no idea what mesa is. It sounds like I have some homework to do. Thanks for the info.

The 3D drivers the article mentions.

You don't update an individual driver on Linux, you update the whole pack, be it manually building mesa, or including a repository with a more frequently updated one.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

I actually like Intels open source work on Linux better than AMDs when it comes to GPUs. I’ve never had much luck getting OpenCL installed and working on AMD. Pro drivers for this architecture, ROCm for that architecture, but make sure you have the right kernel too.

 

[Minus Infinity]

I'm not usually optomistic, but if Intel can get Battlemage out next year with half-decent drivers and can get to the 4080 level they are claiming, we may finally have decent competiton and AMD should be the most worried. Huang doesn't give two shits about consumer GPU market so they won't care.

 

[Squared]

Also for everyone else. 6.2 or maybe even 3? is baseline for 23/04 and 6.5 was confirmed for 23.10 though since popOS runs behind I guess you will be stuck with every other ubuntu flavor instead

Actually it's worse than that, the latest popOS is based on Ubuntu 22.04, since that's the last LTS release. But it is using kernel 6.2.6 which I believe is newer than Ubuntu 22.04.

 

[Chomiq]

Competition is good, we need Intel to stir up the GPU market. I wish them well, even if I wouldn't purchase any of their current offerings.

 

[Wye]

Linux Gaming, that's where the money is!
/s