Intel's Open-Source Compute Runtime Performing Increasingly Well Against NVIDIA's Proprietary Linux Driver
Given the recent launch of the Intel Arc Graphics A580 for under $200, I've been working on a fresh round of Intel / AMD Radeon / NVIDIA GeForce Linux gaming/graphics and compute benchmark results. Next week that fresh arsenal of Linux graphics benchmarks on the very latest drivers will be published but for today is a look at the most surprising aspect: the OpenCL-focused GPU compute benchmarks.
In this article is a look at the DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics line-up against similar NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards while focusing in on the GPU compute performance. Since earlier this year the open-source Intel Compute Runtime has been working quite well on Arc Graphics for both OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero / SYCL support. Since then it's only gotten better. In this article are OpenCL benchmarks as well as a brief Vulkan compute test too for reference. Due to time constraints and not experimenting with the Codeplay SYCL plug-in for NVIDIA yet, those oneAPI/SYCL benchmarks aren't in for this multi-vendor comparison.
Similarly, with AMD not yet supporting the entire RDNA3 line-up with ROCm and Ubuntu 23.10 not even being an officially supported platform anyhow, this article is just looking at the Intel Arc Graphics up against the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack.
All tests were done on Ubuntu 23.10 from an Intel Core i9 13900K desktop while using the Linux 6.6 kernel. The Intel Arc Graphics A380 / A580 / A750 / A770 were all tested with the Intel Compute Runtime 23.30.26918.9 providing the compute support. On the NVIDIA side was their new 535.23.06 beta driver while testing with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3080, and RTX 4060 graphics cards as the close spectrum for comparison to DG2/Alchemist hardware. Unfortunately there are no GeForce RTX 4060 Ti / RTX 4070 / RTX 4070 Ti Linux benchmarks due to NVIDIA having not supplied any review samples to Phoronix.
In addition to looking at the GPU compute performance the GPU power consumption was monitored along with providing current performance-per-dollar metrics based on current retail pricing. Let's look at this GPU compute comparison ahead of the NVIDIA / AMD / Intel 1080p Linux graphics/gaming comparison due out next week.