Intel Arc Graphics A580 On Linux: Open-Source Graphics For Under $200

Here is a look at the GPU power consumption across the entire range of gaming/graphics and GPU compute benchmarks carried out. On average the Arc Graphics A580 was pulling 109 Watts with a recorded peak of 150 Watts with the sensors exposed by the i915 kernel driver. The bit unfortunate aspect of these results is the minimum power consumption during the brief moments of idle. Like the A750/A770, the Arc Graphics A580 continues to have a relatively high idle power consumption of around 39 Watts.

Lastly is the geometric mean for all the data collected from this round of Intel Arc Graphics Linux testing. See all of my collected data in full via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. On Linux 6.6 + Mesa 23.3-devel, the Arc Graphics A580 was running at 93% the speed of the Arc Graphics A750 or 89% the speed of the flagship Arc Graphics A770. For costing just $179 USD from AIB partners like with the ASRock Challenger A580, the Arc Graphics A580 delivers great value in the sub-$200 space. Plus it's backed by fully open-source and upstream Linux graphics drivers.

The Linux driver support when the Arc Graphics first launched was a bit rough but has matured nicely over the past year. Those using modern Linux distributions should be in good shape even for brand new cards like the Arc Graphics A580. Not only is the OpenGL and Vulkan driver support via Mesa in great shape but the oneAPI SYCL / OpenCL support has matured too quite well over the past year as shown by the many GPU compute tests.

With the Arc Graphics A580 retailing for well under $200 and backed by fully open-source Linux graphics drivers and having full support for Intel's GPU-accelerated software ecosystem, the A580 is quite an interesting contender. NVIDIA, of course, only has their out-of-tree kernel driver option when it comes to open-source support while the community Nouveau driver support still has a long ways to go before it will be performant on recent generations of hardware, etc. On the AMD side is their well regarded open-source Linux drivers but with the Radeon RX 7600 costing ~$249 and lacking any official ROCm/compute support at this time. As for downsides with the A580, the idle power consumption remains high.

Stay tuned for the fresh round of Intel Arc Graphics vs. AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce Linux GPU benchmarks up next on Phoronix.