Wonder if anyone here is an early adopter of the Intel Arc GPU’s and what your opinions are. I have a couple of dated desktops and am considering one of the Arc series due to what looks to be a good price/performance ratio.
Thanks & regards.
I was excited for them and had been keeping up with ARC from day 1, i planned to get one on release…but those plans changed
ARC is doing a bit better on linux than on Windows but overall its a HUGE mess right now. Lack of vulkan extensions, no vaapi acceleration atm, among other issues make them incredibly terrible as a buy. Theres also the little bit that to update the GPU firmware on linux absolutely requires intel management engine for the time being.
TLDR if you REALLY want ARC but can wait, i would give it around 6months. If you need a GPU now AMD is just a miles better option
1 Like
Hi Echoa
Yep I also have been reading about the (so far) mess. I get conflicting reports from Tom’s Hardware and Phoronix about the Arc FW updates, some say there is a workaround for systems without IME… I also read on Tom’s that Intel has an Ubuntu driver but…that it will only work with one specific version of Uby. I was curious about whether the nouveau driver would run an Arc card, barring all else. However, I think you are correct, it would be a good idea to wait. Exciting prices given the card specs and memory. I am limping along with 2 GB of video RAM servicing 2 monitors on one desktop and the same servicing 3 monitors on the other. I dont game but I do some creative work as well as financials so I was excited when I saw the Arc prices…also was left temporarily in the dirt with the 6.1 kernel upgrade and for a few days, no legacy 470xx drivers for old cards. I have NVidia and have learned to live with what that entails but I may give AMD a try.
Many thanks for the kind and informative reply.
1 Like
nouveau is the part of Mesa for nvidia so thats not possible, but Mesa works fine enough for normal usage but ARC has a lot of issues running games, encoding video, or doing opencl/compute stuff or AI on linux right now.
Right now Intel is worse than AMD for what youre doing, they in theory would be better for creative work but the situation with drivers/support right now is chaos for ARC and you will be very disappointed
Im waiting for the low end ARC for a dedicated encoder card. Ive been keeping a close eye on it but even if they released them right now i wouldnt touch it yet.
1 Like
Thanks for this. In addition to my creative/financials I was hoping to get a card to take some of the computing load in software defined radio. I also was thinking about the 380 first and the 770 second depending on how the 380 worked out, but yep, I will wait. When I got your last message, was on Amazon looking at AMD cards. Prices have really come down since ETH went to proof of stake.
Many thanks. Curious about what the encoder card is for if you care to share what you are working on.
Regards
nothing special, just encoding with OBS-Studio, Hanbrake, and KdenLive is what i want it for. They all can make use of GPU encoders and currently Intel has the best hardware encoder for quality/performance…just nobody can really make effective use of it because the launch has been horrible lol
1 Like
Thanks very much for sharing. Interesting work you have there!