I’m considering building a new machine soon and was looking at the Intel Arc GPUs as a possibility. Anyone have experience using them in their system? I’m on Arch btw

  • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
    12·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been running an A770 Limited Edition on Arch for a year now and I am happy with it now. It was a rough start, with issues ranging from glitches and crashes to HDMI and DisplayPort audio/VRR issues, but these days it is pretty solid. VRR works fine on my DisplayPort 144Hz 4K monitor. Most games perform pretty well but temper your expectations, the A770 is a midrange card.

    I can play Overwatch 2 at 4K 144Hz low settings just fine and I don’t see many frame dips. It’s not noticeable if it does dip because VRR. CS2 performance isn’t amazing, but at low settings 4K I get between 100 and 160 frames depending on complexity. I have FSR turned on. On Cyberpunk I have FSR turned on and it seems to dip down to 20fps when out in the desert and the city is in view, but usually 40 to 60.

    • SteveTech@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I wasn’t able to enable VRR on my monitor (with freesync). I’m using KDE Wayland on Debian Testing, just wondering if you knew a workaround or something?

      • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
        2·
        1 year ago

        What kernel are you using? Debian tends to lag behind with kernel updates which makes it a bad choice when running new hardware. I switched from Debian to Arch when I got my A770 because at the time Debian’s latest kernel even in sid didn’t support Arc at all while it worked fine in Arch.

        • SteveTech@programming.devEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I’m running 6.5.10, also with an A770. I could maybe try/compile 6.6 later, but 6.5 seems new enough I thought.

            • SteveTech@programming.devEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              Yeah no change with 6.6, I guess I’ll probably open an issue somewhere when I have the time to figure out what’s broken.

              • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
                1·
                1 year ago

                Just to make sure, you’re using DisplayPort right? I don’t think the Arc cards support VRR over HDMI. The HDMI port on the Arc is actually a built in DisplayPort to HDMI converter, and I don’t think any converter chips support VRR modes.

        • hellvolution@lemmygrad.ml
          1·
          1 year ago

          Do you know you can add testing, sid, experimental repositories, right? Sid & experimental have super new kernels/versions…

    • Static_Rocket@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, I’ve noticed occasional regressions in video decode performance between kernel releases but they tend to fix them in the next release.

      Otherwise smoother sailing than Nvidia for sure.

  • mondoman712@lemmy.mlEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    I have an a770. The only issue that I’ve had with what little gaming I do, is that CS2 ran pretty terribly, although I tried again last night and it seemed much better.

  • woelkchen@lemmy.world
    5·
    1 year ago

    As a general rule for new hardware from Linux friendly companies, you’re pretty much in the best possible position already by using a rolling release distribution. It’s the same with AMD where reports of bugs from 6 months ago are basically ancient past by now.

  • aksdb@feddit.de
    4·
    1 year ago

    I would love to upgrade to one, but from tests I gathered that they have an exceedingly bad idle power draw. Given that the card would idle most of the time, I don’t really want to waste power on it if nvidia and amd manage to stay far lower.

  • Quack Doc@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 year ago

    Intel A350, can’t say I have many complaints now. a lot of the issues have been ironed out. I’m not sure if the sparse work has landed for i915 yet, but once it does I don’t think I will have too many super major issues left. Im getting some artifacts when using gamescope, but that’s not a major issue for me since I don’t really need gamescope

  • cujo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    UPDATE: I picked up the ARC A750. Been driving it around for awhile. Older DirectX games perform on par or often even better on Linux with ARC than they do on Windows. DX12 games had negligible performance boosts being run on Windows vs. Linux with ARC save some big exceptions…

    Certain DX12 titles, one of which I own (Halo Infinite) WILL NOT RUN under Linux WITH the ARC card due to a lack of features in Vulkan. There are still some DX12 calls that have no equivalents in Vulkan, and while some games flag this feature set without using it and MAY be able to be tricked into running without it, any games that actually USE those features will not run under Linux with the ARC card, period. So… Research your newer AAA DX12 titles first.

  • cujo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    Glad I’m not the only one with this question. Feels like it’s difficult to find up-to-date information on the performance of these Arc cards on Linux; I’d like to support Intel’s move into this space but it’s hard without knowing how drastically it’s going to affect my gaming performance. 😅

    I’m glad to hear the situation seems to be rapidly improving. I may pick up an A770 yet.