The Current Intel Arc Graphics Linux Gaming Performance On Linux 6.2 + Mesa 23.1-dev

The Xonotic runs further reinforce the great OpenGL performance of the Arc Graphics A750/A770 on Linux making use of a modern kernel and Mesa driver stack.

That was the quick update as to the current Intel Arc Graphics performance on Linux. The OpenGL support with Iris Gallium3D is in very nice shape and performing competitively to the AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics. For modern Linux games -- namely Steam Play titles -- like with Cyberpunk 2077 the performance shows there is much room for improvement. But also quite limiting for now is the lack of Vulkan sparse residency support by Intel's Vulkan driver (ANV) that is needed for getting modern D3D12 games running well with Steam Play / VKD3D-Proton. That sparse residency support is held up for the VM_BIND patches to land in the kernel that will hopefully happen sooner rather than later, but looking like Linux 6.4 at least.

So for now Linux gamers considering Arc Graphics will likely face challenges if wanting to play the latest popular Windows games with Steam Play until some driver features/issues are sorted out. But if playing many retro titles relying upon OpenGL, there the performance has proven overall to be in excellent shape. The OpenGL performance is very strong for Arc Graphics on Linux as well as great open-source GPU compute capabilities with OpenCL and Level Zero. Hopefully the remaining Vulkan driver challenges will be addressed soon -- stay tuned to Phoronix for news on that and subsequent benchmarks. With the Xe KMD driver coming too, it's an interesting year in the Intel open-source graphics world.