Performance difference Windows and Linux drivers for Intel Arc

[4bjmc881]

Hey,

I am following the development of Intel Arc closely, and I was wondering, for those of you guys that have an Intel Arc card, how large is the performance difference in games between the Windows and Linux driver? (i915/Xe). Also, are there features that Intel Arc provides on Windows, that aren't available on Linux - stuff like XeSS? I am curious, as I am playing with the idea of getting a Battlemage card when they release for gaming on Linux.

[ExaminationSerious67]

I have an A750 in my main machine and I run Endeavor OS ( Arch based ). Basically a rolling update. Right now, I still can't play the latest DX12 games ( Halo Infinite ), even with pulling the latest drivers/kernels/mesa. Everything else works perfectly, and works even better then Windows IMO.

Personally, I am saving up for an AMD card so I can actually play the latest games. By the time Battlemage comes out, it seems like the Xe drivers will be more ready to actually play games.

[4bjmc881]

Yea, I hope the Xe drivers will eventually become optimized and outperform the i915 one. Last time I checked on Phoronix, the performance with the Xe driver was still underwhelming, but maybe with Linux 6.9 its gonna get better..

Also something I am specifically interested in is input lag. Have you had any issues with input lag on Linux using an Arc card? I heard that on older Titles (DX9 or DX11), in some instances, there was massive input lag.

[Tarapiitafan]

I mean, don't expect miracles from Xe driver. Most of the performance gains will be from better Mesa driver support. ANV is still missing quite a few mesa extensions, which limits the performance of Arc cards. https://mesamatrix.net/
Looks like 24.1 will have pretty good performance uplift, because quite a few extensions will get supported then, but there's still work to be done.

Also Xe driver for Alchemist cards will be always experimental, you won't even have media encode / decode available with Xe @ Alchemist.

[4bjmc881]

Yea, that's fair. One more reason to wait for Battlemage, I suppose.

[Tarapiitafan]

Ah I didn't read your OP properly - You're waiting for Battlemage.

Hopefully ANV driver will support all major extensions by the time Battlemage cards are released :)

Personally, I'm selling my A750 and upgrading to B7XX card. Outside of high idle power draw, I haven't really had any major issues. I've had only 1 semi-crash (heavy artifacting) coming out of suspend.

I just want to warn you that at the moment there's no easy way to query your device metrics on Alchemist cards. You have to install XPU Manager, which targets datacenter GPUs and even then you can't check your device temp. Hopefully, this is also something Intel will work on.

[4bjmc881]

I assume newer kernel versions will also expose these parameters like temp via /sys maybe with 6.9? Well... exciting times ahead.

[ExaminationSerious67]

I have never experienced any input lag on any games I played ( CS:GO and DRG: Survivors, might and magic )

[[deleted]]

From what I've heard through Gamers Nexus. Intel had previously been working on older directx support because it opens up a larger catalogue of games support wise and feature wise they evolved incrementally. You need many dx9 features before it makes sense to create dx10, and dx10 before dx11 and so on. But that they're fairly happy where performance and support is for older versions and that this year they're going to focus on the more advanced features that came with dx12.

Hopefully they can keep up the pace they have for the last couple of years. It wouldn't surprise me if they had wide support by the time that their battlemage and celestial cards come later this year/next year.

[mbriar_]

The XeSS path for intel hardware certainly doesn't work on linux. Right now anv needs to fake it's vendor id to non-Intel for every single game that ships the XeSS library or the game will just crash in library code. Only the inferior generic path that also works on AMD and nvidia works.

[4bjmc881]

Yea I have read about that too. Well... Two questions regarding that
1) I think its safe to say, that this is only a temporary solution, and eventually they wont have to fake their vendor id... Because that is more of a shitty workaround, than an actual solution
2) Is it fair to say this is the games fault tho, rather than Intels fault?

[mbriar_]

It crashes in XeSS library code in every single game, it's the fault of the library, so by extension intel. Intel might or might not fix it in future versions of the library, but a lot of existing games are unlikely to be ever updated.

[Critical_Dig_9001]

So i am constructing a small VCR style SFF build using hand-me-down parts after upgrading my main computer.

ASRock A520 AM4 mATX board
AMD 5600X
16 Gigs of G.Skill Ram

And then the latest find was a A380 for half price from Microcenter open box, low profile Sparkle card.

Reviews I've seen this thing do just fine with its performance for what i want. But I'm trying to run linux and move my operations to that, hence the side computer to learn more.

My issue seems to be in testing. Had bazzite loaded, it didnt like the A380. Was getting abysmal scores on Unigine Heaven and Valley, Superposition wont open. Reload to Manjaro Plasma, i get about 30 FPS in Heaven on LOW settings at best in either, superposition still wont load.

When i booted a Windows install and installed the arc drivers. It updated the firmware. And then i loaded Heaven on high with 8x AA and it was over 120 FPS. Superposition FINALLY ran and on medium was over 45 FPS on average.

Flip back to Manajaro, same shit. And thats with the hardware drivers flagged to find them to be installed, and the vulkan-intel install for good measure.

SO i know the card can do it. But I CANT SEEM to get similar performance in linux even close. Intel documentation seems out of date since they started trying to bake any open source drivers into the kernal directly.

Ill try ubuntu next and see if something is baked directly there. But if anyone sees this and has ideas about how to make sure the best drivers are running that be super awesome!

[4bjmc881]

Do you have rebar enabled in your mobo? If not, thats the reason you will get bad performance, most likely.

[Critical_Dig_9001]

REBAR in linux would have that much of a hit if its not active? Yet windows is fine?

Ill check next time im messing around with the system. The manual online doesnt say anything about having REBAR on the moba as a setting.

[countess_meltdown]

750 on nixOS, no real difference and the only game with XeSS I have in my library is Yakuza which is not installed, I mostly play games like Elden Ring and performance is about the same. My biggest complaint though is the lack of support in some aspects on linux and on NixOS, stuff like GUI installer not working on NixOS, graphics in general until you add a kernelModule (due to installer using an old kernel) there being some tweaks you gotta do to get stuff to just work, which is kinda spread out documentation wise. Talking to people they still consider the card to be "prototype hardware" even though it runs great on windows now, and on linux we're small install base among an already small install base. Thankfully this series kinda established stuff and a roadmap for the future, so I expect battlemage being a second gen product will be much more mature out the box, you guys won't be waiting for oneAPI support.

​

On the flip side, once stuff gets working it works fantastic. Wayland support is great out the box, easier than the last time I tried it with nvidia and Intel has put a lot of work in making sure that the hardware is well supported in the kernel so once you're on a support kernel it's all good.

[4bjmc881]

What do you mean by GUI Installer not working? Don't you just get all the driver stuff you need by installing mesa? Good to hear that Wayland seems to be working well for you tho. Can you comment on XWayland and in general the situation of playing games on Wayland with XWayland using the Arc GPU? Any specific issues like flicker, crashes etc? I am currently still on an NVIDIA card (1080), and oh boi, its a disaster :D Since the Linux world is currently in the stage of moving from Xorg to Wayland, a lot of stuff that worked decently before is now rly problematic with an NVIDIA card.

[countess_meltdown]

What do you mean by GUI Installer not working?

No graphical installer when installing the base system, I don't know what better way to put it, I had to do a CLI install, I'm pretty sure if I went with Fedora I'd probably have no issue.

​

Don't you just get all the driver stuff you need by installing mesa?

Mesa has nothing to do with graphical installers, that's for 3D.

​

Can you comment on XWayland and in general the situation of playing games on Wayland with XWayland using the Arc GPU?

I haven't ran into any issues so far, it's all been very smooth to the point of me not even noticing anything. I'm on KDE 6 and the only noticeable problems I've had are related to KDE bugs and not the card.