this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023

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If successful, Intel's next generation Battlemage graphics cards will benefit all gamers (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 10 months ago

Even if you never buy an Arc card, a competitive Intel will benefit all gamers.

Only if someone else does for you.

[–] Sanctus 33 points 10 months ago (2 children)

No open sources drivers, no buy

[–] [email protected] 55 points 10 months ago (1 children)

How do you not know that Intel has they same type of open source graphics driver like AMD? Their kernel module, OpenGL and Vulkan libraries are all free software, only requiring small firmware blobs. That's why Intel 'just werks' on Linux without having to download a 500mb kernel module or have a separate .iso available to download specific to the hardware.

[+] Sanctus -51 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

That was a little rude. I have never read anything about these cards, thats exactly how. This article was the first thing. Drivers are mentioned once in the article, in a single sentence, not about the licensing.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago (1 children)

that was a little rude

Bro you came in pretty hot too.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Because the average person couldn't care less about licensing.

[+] Sanctus -9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Open source is licensing. If you post your code, but dont allow people to modify or use it, its not open. If you're going to be rude at least know the subject.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I know what open source means. 95%+ of people literally don't give a shit, that's why a mainstream media site didn't write about it.

[+] Sanctus -10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Look, I commented what I care about. I wanna build a linux machine next and it needs open drivers. Get on the gloating dogpile if you want. But I dont really follow graphics cards too hard until I need a new one. So I dont really give a shit how or what I didn't know when I don't need to know it yet. Good afternoon.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Why are you complaining about something you don't know? You get mad because people call out your ignorance. Nobody would care about your ignorance if you didn't spout wrong information.

[+] Sanctus -8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I was stating my stance on GPUs. Dont really see how thats wrong information dude. What the fuck? Lemmy comes in here like every statement is a fucking fact and its not. Its a message board. I get annoyed when people reply like "HoW Do YoU NoT KnOW?" That shit is rude as fuck. Intel graphics card drivers arent common knowledge, and most people don't track graphics cards in their spare time even if they dont need one. So, no, I'm not called out or mad about it. I'm mad cause there always has to be a smug ass dog pile on my own opinions like I'm stating fact.

[–] Cypher 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

No open source drivers

That looks a lot like a claim, from an ignorant fool who doubled down when called out.

There’s this neat thing called the internet with search engines that could have quickly yielded the information you decided you didn’t need before spouting bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

At an absolute minimum! When Arc first came out I considered getting one just for the AV1 encoder, but there's very little else going for the whole line. An open-source driver at least makes the techier among us more likely to want to play with one.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

There was some mesa bug that was over 2 years old that was just merged in recently that fixed a huge Arc bottleneck. It's embarrassing how bad the implementations are for both Windows and Linux.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That article is full of speculation; “if this” and “if that” and “if this other thing” than it will be great for everyone!

“If” is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting..

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I'd like to say they can only get better than the current generation, but it is Intel we're talking about.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

I am curous about the VRAM and price points and whether they will be useful for LLMs

[–] kemsat 7 points 10 months ago

Hoping they can outperform the dying 2080 Ti I have. I could use a cheap GPU upgrade.

[–] BigTrout75 4 points 10 months ago

... in the future!!!!

[+] [email protected] -41 points 10 months ago (10 children)

That's what they said about Arc and then they were garbage

[–] simple 47 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Were they though? After they fixed the drivers and used proper transition layers for directX they're really decent entry-level cards.

[–] TheGrandNagus 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I disagree.

The drivers are much improved, yes, but in the meantime we've had the Arc cards performing like shit and being unstable for a year, and that's after they already released far later than the competition. Even now the drivers are still much worse than AMD or Nvidia and run into issues.

Their power usage is a joke, their die size is more similar to a card 2 tiers above the performance of what the cards achieve.

The price wasn't good either. Yeah they beat Nvidia by a bit, but they cost more than AMD for a far inferior product.

Arc was a failure. That's why Intel shut down their AXG division. You don't do that to a division that's performing well.

I understand people want a third player in the GPU space, I do too, but the truth is, Arc was bad. I don't think we should call them good just because they have a blue badge instead of a green or red one.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

Based comment. I want them to succeed. I guess. But people seem to be making disingenuous claims about it.

[–] cm0002 31 points 10 months ago

Uh they weren't garbage, there was some crappy drivers early on, but that's mostly been fixed now. They're no 4090Ti Ultra Premium Super Whatever, but on cost to performance in the entry level segment they're solid performers

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

The A770 is actually fantastic, even more so for the price.

What was garbage was the drivers and they've come a long way in bringing them up to speed.

They had and to some extent still have a rather gigantic hurdle to cross getting older games up to speed, but the decision to employ at least partial Vulkan translation instead of trying to get DX9/10 drivers up to speed was a huge leap already.

For modern games, when they are at least tested to run on the Intel cards, they perform on par with cards from AMD and Nvidia that cost $150+ more.

And no, this isn't coming from some Intel fanboy, I haven't bought an Intel CPU since Coppermine and for GPUs I've simply switched between what was the best for a specific priceclass at the time I upgraded. And whenever something really new came along, like Kyro3D and PhysX cards (and now Intels GPUs), I bought those too.

Also realize that Arcs ray tracing engine beats AMDs and keeps up with Nvidias in their first iteration of the chip.

Their tech is sound and fully has the potential to be a competitor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Can you give advice about if arc gpus are a good choice for linux pcs? I'm planning to build a pc with my so and it will be her first linux machine (probably linux mint debian if relevant). She's tech savy but not the kind that fiddles with driver problems for hours, so it should work more or less out of the box. My reference is the rx 6700xt that I have at my garuda (arch) that runs genrally fine with minor sound bugs (hdmi).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

EDIT: I just re-read your comment and realized you were asking specifically about Intel Arc cards. Sorry I don’t have any experience with them. I’ll leave this comment here though in case it’s useful in some way.

Everyone seems to always recommend AMD cards for Linux but at least in my experience I’ve had no issues with Nvidia cards. I have a 1070 in my home Proxmox server passed through to a Debian transcoding for Plex and Jellyfin, and in my gaming machine I dual boot Debian and my 4090 works just fine so far (including HDMI sound). I just installed the latest drivers on both machines and they “just worked”.

I don’t personally have any issues with using proprietary drivers, but I understand why people prefer AMD for the open source drivers if that’s important to them. I just wanted to chime in with my experience because a lot of people will outright dismiss Nvidia cards for Linux saying they don’t work well, regardless of the politics of the drivers. At least for me they work fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I don’t have any experience with any brand other than AMD on Linux, but my understanding is that anything other than AMD dGPUs are a crapshoot if you’re wanting any more than display out.

Arc looks great, but the drivers are barely okay at Windows. I doubt 3D works acceptably in Linux.

Given Arc’s relative performance, for Linux grab a 6600-6600XT-6650XT-7600-6700-6700XT and call it a day. Don’t think too hard about it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Got a buddy who just picked up an A770 16gb. Seems pretty pleased with it.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago

The Arc cards are the most price efficient graphics cards now, that's hardly garbage.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The cheap arc are great, no amazing, for homeservers and transcoding.

[–] Kushan 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Have people actually used them for transcoding in anger yet? I was very interested in buying one for transcoding on a Plex or jellyfin server but last I checked, there were still lots of driver limitations

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

It's supposed to have support in Jellyfin.

[–] Kushan 1 points 10 months ago

Supposed to yes, but when I last checked (which was a few months ago, admittedly), it would crap out if you tried to transcode more than a couple of streams at a time. Which given that an intel CPU with quicksync can easily do 20+ 1080p streams, was a bit of a let down.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I was tempted to try it but my Jellyfin server is hosted on an Unraid box and Unraid doesn't (didn't?) support the Intel GPUs.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Eh the Arcs are fine, especially for a first gen attempt.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Its performance and driver situation might not be as great as AMD and Nvidia at the moment, but at least it works. At the very least still miles ahead of Moore Threads GPUs, which released around the same time.

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble 5 points 10 months ago

The games that have drivers make it a kick ass card. It's just a question of if every game you play has those drivers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Latest batch of drivers has them competing against the mid-range current-gen cards. They're putting in the work to really start throwing punches.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

Responding to the pro arc people: "yeah the last one was kinda shit. And it's Intel. But, it's cool because it's not AMD or Nvidia"

I'm so confused