Intel Arc Graphics Show Good Potential For Linux Workstation OpenGL Performance

With the SNX-04 viewset from SPECViewPerf 2020, the Arc Graphics A750/A770 come in light at around the performance of the Radeon RX 6400... But well ahead of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 performance. This viewset is one of the extreme cases with NVIDIA's driver on Windows and Linux long limiting the performance of GeForce GPUs in some workstation workloads. The AMD driver traditionally had a similar focus for their consumer cards, but the past few years have seen the Radeon GPUs enjoy very great performance in SPECViewPerf and related for consumer hardware. There's been a ton of RadeonSI Gallium3D optimization work to benefit OpenGL workstation workloads and it has paid off very well. With being open-source, the driver doesn't artificially limit the performance/features based on the product string/IDs or similar.

The CATIA viewset saw the GeForce RTX 3060 performing better than with SNX but running at only around the speed of the RX 6400 while the Radeon GPUs continued to enjoy much better performance for SPECViewPerf. The Arc Graphics here were trailing the RX 6400.

The ENERGY viewset making use of OpendTect visualizations saw the worst performance out of the Arc Graphics... Clearly something going awry or a major inefficiency with the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver severely limiting its performance.

Meanwhile with SPECViewPerf's MEDICAL-O3 viewset is where the Intel Arc Graphics performed the best for SPECViewPerf on Linux. Both the Arc Graphics A750/A770 were outperforming the Radeon RX 6600 XT graphics card with this viewset.

The Arc Graphics A750/A770 continued pulling much more power than the other tested cards, but at least here the performance-per-Watt came out comparable to the AMD RDNA2 GPUs.

In this optimal case, the performance-per-dollar of the Intel Arc Graphics DG2 hardware is leading over the other comparison cards.