Intel Arc Graphics A380: Compelling For Open-Source Enthusiasts & Developers At ~$139

On the Arc Graphics Windows side, it was recently announced how the DirectX 9 support is being mapped atop DirectX 12 using a new layer developed by Intel, rather than maintaining a dedicated D3D9 driver for these new graphics cards. That raised some Linux users wondering whether something similar would be needed on the Linux side... Like mapping OpenGL atop the Vulkan API with the existing Zink Gallium3D code in Mesa. So I tried that too on the Arc Graphics A380. I ran some tests there out of curiosity with the same Linux 6.0 state and Mesa 22.3-dev, but the second time switching over to use the Zink OpenGL implementation atop the Intel ANV Vulkan driver.

While Zink has shown to be competitive on the Radeon side atop the RADV Vulkan driver compared to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, this isn't the case on the Intel Arc Graphics side. The dedicated Iris Gallium3D OpenGL driver was faster than Zink atop the ANV Vulkan driver. In some cases quite a large spread, in other areas fairly close performance. Only with some YQuake2 game runs was the Zink results faster than the Iris Gallium3D driver.

So at least for now, there is no reason to avoid using Iris Gallium3D... Its OpenGL support for DG2/Alchemist is in good shape and Zink wasn't showing any magical advantages there. Those curious about all the raw side-by-side results for Iris vs. Zink on the A380 can see this result page with all the benchmarks.

In addition, as this past week brought a new batch of Intel DRM GT Next changes for Linux 6.1 with additional DG2/Alchemist tuning, including a performance related patch, I did run some quick benchmarks there... Comparing the current Linux 6.0 Git results to that of this very early code for Linux 6.1 by way of DRM-Next. But keep in mind this is just the first of several pulls of new Intel DRM driver material expected for Linux 6.1:

At the moment the performance is flat with the changes from this week on DRM Intel GT Next state as of 26 August 2022. Those numbers if interested are in this result file. The main takeaway is no performance breakthrough yet with "drm-intel-gt-next-2022-08-24" but I continue monitoring Linux graphics driver code changes on a daily basis.