Intel Arc Graphics Show Good Potential For Linux Workstation OpenGL Performance

The Arc Graphics A750/A770 during these workstation OpenGL tests did continue to consume noticeably more power than the other tested AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Lastly is the geometric mean of all the workstation OpenGL benchmarks carried out for this article. Overall the Arc Graphics A750/A770 came up shy of the Radeon RX 6600 but in particular for the SPECViewPerf 2020 MEDICAL and ParaView workloads is where the DG2/Alchemist GPUs were able to really shine at this time with their current open-source Linux driver stack. These Intel Arc Graphics A750/A770 cards did perform better than the GeForce RTX 3060 GPU overall, due to NVIDIA's consumer GPUs being limited in their workstation abilities due to driver limitations and/or other factors. But on the Intel Arc Graphics side with their fully open-source Linux graphics driver, there is no artificial product segmentation in their driver code or artificial limiting of any optimizations to just their data center GPUs or similar. Especially for those making use of ParaView or similar, the Arc Graphics performance on Linux is quite positive. Though it would be interesting to reproduce this testing on Windows as there it's the Direct3D 12 driver widely regarded to be in good shape for Arc Graphics while the other graphics APIs/drivers less so.

In case you missed it from testing earlier this month, Intel Arc Graphics OpenCL/compute is performing very well too and showing much potential. Plus now with the Linux 6.2 stable kernel being out now, there is out-of-the-box support on Linux for DG2/Alchemist GPUs assuming you are on Linux 6.2+ (otherwise the i915.force_probe workaround) and running Mesa 23.0 or newer will yield the best OpenGL/Vulkan support while there continue to be new refinements there landing regularly.