It seems to me that most of the first adopters of hardware are on linux (at least on arch linux distros). Not having good linux support isn’t good IMO. I don’t know anyone in real life or online who have these intel GPUs despite the cost effectiveness
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Compared to what?
AMD: Productive work support on Linux is embarrassing. Ships black screening driver or kernel support every few months. The only thing it has going is Valve support for gaming.
Nvidia: Closed driver and just recently got their shit together on wayland. Constantly lacking behind Windows on gaming by 10%+ percent, so it has become a running joke if 20xx is the year they fix it on Linux.
Would you buy an Intel GPU as a gaming card: No. But saying Intel is “dropping the ball” is just drama.
I have to admit to running older games on Steam (Serious Sam series, UT 2004 & UT3, Star Conflict, EVE Online, Endless Sky & In The Black(newer & I have just tinkered with it)).
I don’t have any problems with frame rates in any of those games—my monitor is slightly older—34” with 140FPS max & I can max any of those games at max settings. Now, the other part of the equation is the amount of RAM you have & the CPU you are using….I’ve got a “almost” new setup….i7 Ultra 265 & 48G DDR5 6800 in a ASRock Z890 Nova motherboard……..Older systems still have problems with CPU overhead with the Xe driver….so, that could be your problem. The 6-19 kernel is supposed to help with that & Intel has been working on it also.
I’m waiting for the 6-19 to see what the improvement will be……plus I’m “hoping” to see the B770 preview at CES in the next week….If so, I’m ready to jump in as soon as a B770 board partner has a nice one out.
Having used Arc cards from the very first, I have seen major improvements….So as long as that maintains at the same pace, I expect to see driver parity in the next year or so….(fingers-crossed). 
To be fair, outside of gaming performance, I have had no issues with the card working correctly as a productivity tool. To be fair, I haven’t used it that long though.
Many of the games I tested that worked were totally playable. For example, KOTOR II took a substantial frame hit as a percentage. But it was still over 300fps. Bioshock Infinite was another one that was worse on Linux but still was over 100fps at max settings at 1440p.
My bigger concern is the lack of compatibility with newer games. The fact that 4 out of the 7 games either didn’t play or were missing support for certain features is concerning to me.
Intel dGPUs don’t have a big market share, but they ship the same tech in laptop-iGPUs en masse for years now. If you’re here you hang around in support forums I assume: When was the last time someone had an issue with an Intel iGPU on Linux (e.g. blackscreening on boot or login)? I can’t remember, stuff usually just works.
The GPU vendor situation on Linux is still a “which bag of hurt is affecting you least”. Compatibility, stability, gaming, productivity, … While you can game on Intel GPUs they are not great gaming GPUs - gaming compatibility and performance is certainly still their bag of hurt.
Understand & the only thing I can say is that the Xe driver has improved massively since its launch… I had issues with EVE Online (although EVE is generally not friendly to Linux at any time… .) & In The Black early on & those were ironed out fairly soon. I also had problems just before the Mesa 25.3 release (related to Mesa & the Xe driver, but very important).
I also must mention that I’m only using Proton-GE with all of those games….In my experience, GE is more “solid” in performance.
All of my benchmarking was done with proton-ge. Although when things didn’t work I did test with proton experimental and the latest stable proton version as well. I also did some testing on a few games with cachyos’s proton version to see if there was a performance difference.
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It would be interesting to see the differences between “now” & when 6-19 is released…also future Mesa updates look interesting…
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I think you are going to see progressive improvements as the third generation of Intel GPU’s start landing. Especially since the arc pro b60 with 48G VRAM is going after workstation graphics and the b770 is expected to drop early 2026. Compared to initial release they have definitely made serious progress. For gaming performance though I would say we are likely going to have to wait until their fourth generation hits to see some sort of parity between platforms.
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