The Arc cards are pretty good for DX12/Vulkan games, but pretty bad at DX9/11 games.
Luckily, the most popular Linux translation layers translate DX9/11 games into Vulkan. In fact, Intel is using such a translation layer on Windows and has significantly improved its performance that way.
The biggest issue still standing seems to be the lack of sparse resources support, but the Intel driver seems to be faking support to prevent games that don't actually use it from crashing in an upcoming update, fixing games like Elden Ring.
I think it's not a bad choice for an affordable Linux gaming rig depending on the games you play. Perhaps it's better to wait for Battlemage first, though. There's still a lot of tooling centered around AMD and Nvidia cards and the Intel drivers still aren't where they need to be if you need to play certain games.
Yeah just I noticed a few recent benchmarks and was kinda surprised. I definitely need to give them a better look.
That said, my own use case is a hilariously overcomplicated VM setup. I archive stuff for myself and help with other archival projects as a hobby, I realized the epyc machine I got for the PCIe lanes is basically perfect for sticking my “desktop” on a numa node and passing an AMD rx 6700xt. Host is currently proxmox, eventually moving to NixOS.
As such an important factor for me is good VFIO compatibility. AMD was supposed to be “it”, but they still have bizarre reset bugs show up in some of their latest models and have gone radio silent on the issue. My own reference card works fortunately, but there’s little telling if another kind will or not. And nvidia has all the typical out of kernel problems while the new drivers mature, but doesn’t have reset issues. Also I dislike Nvidia somewhat more than intel.
When I’m back on the market in a few years that will be the deciding factor. I’m definitely not a typical target market though.
Luckily, the most popular Linux translation layers translate DX9/11 games into Vulkan. In fact, Intel is using such a translation layer on Windows and has significantly improved its performance that way.
Going by these graphs: https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-10p-faster/2 Cyberpunk plays quite well. Double digit percentage gains are reported every few months or so as the driver keeps developing.
The biggest issue still standing seems to be the lack of sparse resources support, but the Intel driver seems to be faking support to prevent games that don't actually use it from crashing in an upcoming update, fixing games like Elden Ring.
I think it's not a bad choice for an affordable Linux gaming rig depending on the games you play. Perhaps it's better to wait for Battlemage first, though. There's still a lot of tooling centered around AMD and Nvidia cards and the Intel drivers still aren't where they need to be if you need to play certain games.