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

So how I feel about the Intel Arc Graphics A380 overall right now on Linux?

From this initial batch of Linux gaming tests on the Arc Graphics A380 and other low-end cards, many times the Arc Graphics A380 was trailing the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti that is already a six year old graphics card. But in some workloads the A380 did perform well with the likes of the Radeon RX 6400. In cases where there wasn't such a strong showing, one just has to remember though that this is a $139 graphics card. Not just a mythical suggested retail price, but the price I paid last week at retail. So on a value basis, it is priced very well against other entry-level AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

But as for power efficiency, due to the mentioned lack of HWMON support for power hardware monitoring under Linux with DG2/Alchemist, I don't have any numbers to share today. Once those patches are picked up by DRM-Next, I'll run some benchmarks to see how well the performance-per-Watt of the A380 is against AMD and NVIDIA wares on Linux.

While the overall performance was coming in short of where I hope it'd be consistently running, it was a pleasant first experience of using Intel Arc Graphics on Linux. Of the games tested so far with the A380, there were no major rendering artifacts, no GPU hangs, or other crazy show-stoppers. So it was nice from that perspective, but clearly the Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan drivers could stand from greater performance tuning on Linux.

There are also still some missing features like the mentioned power monitoring support (currently in patch form), no GPU core temperature monitoring support, Intel Smooth Sync (currently in patch form), lack of video BIOS updating support (if needed, at least for now it's Windows-only but I haven't had the need to update the vBIOS -- it's possible some performance optimizations will come down the pipe via vBIOS updates), no over/under-clocking support yet under Linux, Vulkan ray-tracing (work in progress), and likely a number of other minor features... These are just the main ones that came to mind over the past few days, beyond the fact that you need the unreleased Linux 6.0 kernel paired with a module option to even have working graphics acceleration.

Given the Linux gaming performance but especially the lack of out-of-the-box support on Linux, to no surprise I wouldn't recommend the A380 to Linux gamers at this point... Not that you can really expect to do too much gaming out of a budget card unless you are really playing some lightweight titles. The main barrier to Linux adoption will be that you need a yet-to-be-released kernel and bleeding edge Mesa drivers.

Hopefully Intel will come up with a packaged/DKMS/repository type options for users on existing Linux distributions to easily access the needed i915 kernel module support and capable ANV/Iris user-space drivers. But even then there will likely be a range of Linux distributions officially supported and would likely be just the few enterprise Linux distributions. Due to the Linux 6.0 kernel not even being stable until early October, aside from the rolling release distributions like Arch Linux it likely won't even be until the H1'2023 Linux distributions before finding decent out-of-the-box Arc Graphics support -- especially with more performance tuning by then and hopefully promoted from behind the i915.force_probe experimental flag.

By the time of Ubuntu 23.04, openSUSE ALP, and Fedora 38, hopefully the Intel Arc Graphics support will have matured a great deal to make for a nice out-of-the-box Linux support experience. At that point when the Arc Graphics "Alchenist" support is nicely out-of-the-box, the Arc Graphics A380 should make a nice all-around, budget GPU for basic Linux desktop use-cases.

While I wouldn't currently recommend the A380 for gamers due to these factors, the Arc Graphics A380 does prove to be a very interesting vehicle for developers and passionate open-source Linux enthusiasts. At $139 it's a wonderful card for students wanting to get into Linux/Mesa GPU driver development or learning any of the Khronos APIs, any developers wanting to experiment with Intel's oneAPI software ecosystem and Level Zero (L0), or even for just a budget graphics card that can run OpenCL 3.0, SYCL-friendly, and embracing other open standards.

The Intel Arc Graphics are as open as the AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver stack (with both vendors, just requiring binary-only firmware). That's much better than on the NVIDIA side where there is the Nouveau open-source driver stack but there the best support remains on the aging GeForce GTX 600/700 Kepler series since those cards can at least be manually re-clocked to the highest performance state. With the GeForce GTX 900 series and newer, the Nouveau driver is still bound to running at the rather low boot clock speeds for the lack of PMU firmware access to properly re-clock the graphics card to its highest performance state. And Nouveau doesn't yet have any mainline Mesa Vulkan driver, but the "NVK" driver has been started to hopefully fill that void but still very early in development. NVIDIA also published their open-source GPU kernel driver back in May but there that still depends upon the closed-source user-space for OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and CUDA. NVIDIA's Open GPU Kernel Driver also isn't mainlined in the Linux kernel and will need refactoring before that is even a possibility.

So with Intel Arc Graphics you have a driver stack as open as AMD from kernel to user-space. Intel's growing software libraries and other user-space components also make the A380 a great choice for those wanting to learn and experiment with them. It's also great that OpenCL 3.0 is there already for this $139 graphics card... It's great seeing the Intel oneAPI software ecosystem support with Level Zero and Compute-Runtime support going down the stack to this entry-level graphics card. In comparison, it took years for the Radeon ROCm stack to support consumer RDNA(2) graphics cards due to their focus on the enterprise/professional products and that does remain their primary focus still for ROCm. CUDA and NVIDIA's other vendor APIs/libraries tend to span their entire product portfolios albeit a proprietary stack.

Intel could really have hit an open-source homerun if the GuC firmware was optional (as it is on prior generations of Intel integrated graphics before ADL-P) or if the GuC firmware was open-source... The viability of it going open-source is probably not too high due to its interactions with HuC that is needed for media authentication and related security tasks. But perhaps we might see a neutered open-source GuC firmware if there is market demand? It would be rather fascinating since if not needing to load any other binary blobs at run-time, Intel Arc Graphics could theoretically be the most open-source friendly GPUs in production. There would still be the matter of the vBIOS, which is baked onto the card and thus even okay'ed by the FSF with it not being a run-time blob.

So if you are either a devoted open-source enthusiast comfortable with Linux and rolling your own kernel builds or a developer wanting to make use of Intel's software libraries and/or just experiment/test with a new driver stack, at $139 USD the ASRock Challenger A380 does actually prove to be great value and exciting prospects. Basically a nice (open-source) technology demonstrator - just as some people spend hundreds for a RISC-V development board that can be outperformed in some workloads by a $35 Raspberry Pi, people buying outdated NVIDIA Kepler GPUs for being more open-source friendly, etc.

The ASRock Challenger ITX A380 actually sells for $139.99 in the US, just not an "suggested" retail price or if ordering from Chinese markets, etc. At this price point it's a nice conduit for experimenting with Intel's open-source graphics driver, experimenting with oneAPI software offerings, and/or begin porting/testing code to ensure it will work on Arc Graphics hardware ahead. When the Linux driver matures, it should be nice for a basic desktop graphics needs too.

I am happy I bought two as namely from that developer perspective, the A380 is exciting at that price point. I wish they would have introduced the A380 as a "developer" product first to set realistic expectations for users of this new driver stack, not set gamer expectations too high, and really promote their oneAPI stack and broader (open-source) software ecosystem. Particularly on the Linux side, developers tend to be very happy in providing early feedback, suggestions, and even patches.

As more software begins to support oneAPI interfaces, SYCL, and Level Zero, Arc Graphics can become even more compelling. Already there was independent experiments with the (now defunct) ZLUDA project for CUDA on Intel GPUs that strived for a drop-in CUDA replacement on Intel GPUs with Level Zero. Another notable adopter of oneAPI is Blender 3.3 to support Intel GPU acceleration as something I look forward to testing next month. I can't wait to see what other innovative open-source projects come about as Arc Graphics become more readily available and developers experiment with Intel's growing software ecosystem.

The Arc Graphics A380 are powerful enough for driving a developer workstation with a composited desktop, basic display needs, and there is the wide support for industry standard APIs. The A380 is affordable enough as well for use within continuous integration systems for graphics testing against the industry APIs and overall a lot of flexibility thanks to the open-source stack.

The other special area of interest with the Alchemist GPUs is having not only accelerated AV1 decode but also AV1 encode -- and on the open-source stack with oneVPL integration. That testing and commentary though will be saved for an article just devoted to the AV1 performance, likely once the HWMON power monitoring support is queued up too for an interesting power efficiency analysis.

From the passionate open-source enthusiast to experienced Linux developer spectrum of users, the Arc Graphics A380 is a great product at ~$139. Already a few days with the Arc Graphics A380, I'm happy with the purchase of the ASRock Challenger Arc Graphics A380 cards for all the reasons outlined. I look forward to plenty more testing with the A380 hardware and covering the maturing open-source driver state. The A380 is a nice starting point if wanting to evaluate the suitability of Intel oneAPI/L0 for your software projects and/or begin porting over to the APIs while waiting on the availability of higher-end Arc Graphics hardware. But if you are a novice Linux user not comfortable spinning your own kernels and running bleeding-edge software, you are best on waiting until more robust and out-of-the-box Linux support for Arc Graphics with the H1'2023 Linux distributions, rolling-release distributions toward the end of this calendar year, or the availability of any packaged driver solutions whether they be from Intel or the likes of Ubuntu PPAs and Fedora Copr repositories.

Hopefully by the time Intel launches their higher-end Arc Graphics desktop graphics cards, the Linux stack will also be in a more mature state for gamers and power users while right now this is basically a nice budget-friendly open-source software development/evaluation platform for Intel oneAPI Level Zero, SYCL, as well as other Khronos' industry-standard APIs.