Since the Intel cards are still somewhat new and you don’t find that many real life impressions I thought I share mine after two days of testing. For the reference it replaces a AMD RT 5500 XT. Since full support for many features is bleeding edge and not available in stable yet I’m using kernel 6.2-rc2, ffmpeg-git with intel’s cartwheel patches and mesa-git.
Exceeds expectations
Plasma wayland runs great - or at least you don’t notice any difference.
Video decoding via VA-API in Firefox, mpv etc. works.
Hardware AV1 encoding with ffmpeg is a blast!
Middle of the road
The just released OBS 29 received support for hardware AV1 encoding, but alas it’s Windows only at the moment, at least the h.264 encoder is picked up properly by OBS.
SDDM didn’t start, so I replaced it with SDDM-git, on the other hand that’s essentially a recommendation on plasma wayland no matter the GPU nowadays.
The card doesn’t offer a silent modus, but the fans are very quiet.
The bumps
I do some light gaming on older titles now and then, and gaming seems a little bit more unstable. I fired up a few games which were already installed and were configured to run with the AMD card (picking the right proton version, DXVK etc). Most ran without issue. One had a minor small visual glitch. But e.g. gamescope currently suffers from a general Intel issue (which has a workaround).
No sensors (temperatures, rpm), mangohud or CoreCtrl yet.
The freaking Intel logo background illumination is going to burn your eyes out.
tl;dr
If you like to tinker a bit, want cheap AV1 encoding, and gaming on Linux is not a priority then the card is very promising. Otherwise give it a few more months to mature on the software side.
