Intel's Open-Source Linux Compute Stack Maturing Very Well For Arc Graphics

It was great having the Intel Compute Runtime open-source stack working out so well on the Arc Graphics A750/A770. From the Blender oneAPI back-end to running Darktable photography software with its OpenCL back-end as well as running FluidX3D and other benchmarks, this latest Intel Linux compute stack worked out great! It was refreshing to have no more driver troubles or other quirks/oddities but was a very pleasant and straight-forward experience. It also installed and worked fine on Ubuntu 23.04 without any fuss and the Compute Runtime stack enjoys broad support beyond just a few select enterprise Linux distributions.

The timing of the Intel Compute Runtime stack and getting back onto its releases (and new monthly release cadence) works well considering the Linux 6.2 kernel that was released as stable in February is also where Intel finally promoted DG2/Alchemist GPUs to "stable" and now enjoying out-of-the-box support on Linux. Intel's OpenGL and Vulkan drivers within Mesa also continue to improve for Linux gaming and I'll have some fresh benchmarks there soon.

While the Arc Graphics A750/A770 performance tended to be comparable to the similar NVIDIA and AMD GPUs tested, one of the main downsides was the higher power consumption. Here's a look at the power consumption across all of the GPU compute benchmarks carried out on each card:

When taking the geometric mean for the subset of benchmarks that ran fine on every single GPU/driver combination, this is how things played out for a high level view:

In those benchmarks the Arc Graphics A770 was comparable to the GeForce RTX 3060, which was great to see, but alas its average power consumption rate was about 16% higher. Though on the Intel side, the Arc Graphics A770 normally retails for less than the GeForce RTX 3060.

In any case it's great to see the open-source Intel Compute Runtime maturing well for the Arc Graphics hardware and now working without issue paired with a mainline Linux 6.2 kernel. Now that getting some of these basic OpenCL tests and more out of the way, next up in the Intel compute testing series will be looking at some of the Level Zero / SYCL benchmarks as well as seeing how the different SYCL solutions for AMD and NVIDIA GPUs are playing out.