> Instantly turn any PC into a gaming console
doesn’t quite fit the limitations stated on the download page
> * AMD Radeon RX 400 series or newer GPU required > * Nvidia and Intel GPUs are not supported > * hybrid graphics are not supported > * virtual machines are not supported
Which is reasonable tbh, nvidia and it’s drivers are such a big stupid pain.
I haven’t been following the arc cards very closely, but my loose impression was the drivers were heavily in flux until recently, and I’ve seen complications pop up in regards to mixtures of bios/uefi options, such as resizable bar being crucial for performance and some virtualization options causing incompatibility or performance issues. Basically the dust is still settling.
As such it’s hard to say “yeah this should work”.
I do think they should list the reasons why certain things are “not supported*, what “not supported” actually means, and not bury these surprises. Otherwise it guarantees confusion and (my wild but good faith) speculation.
You can play a lot of indie games perfectly fine on integrated hardware
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.
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.
9% of Steam users.
For AMD, lots of people game on the community open-source drivers in Mesa. Presumably the same could be true for NVIDIA in the future.
See: https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Turing-Firmware-2023
Granted I don't have a recent GPU (1050Ti), but nouveau has been unable to run plasma with compositing enabled reliably for more than about 10 days straight on that system. Sometimes I can clear up the issues by forcing a mode-switch, othertimes it requires I restart Xorg, othertimes a reboot is needed. I should note I gave up on it in late 2021, so things may have improved in that time.
Activation limits were extremely unpopular during their time 10-15 years ago and have mostly been removed from old games. I don't think that's coming back. They really have no reason to object to their game being run from Stream/Epic either. The main complainant back then was from Hinterland (who make The Long Dark) who was more morally outraged than concerned with lost revenue or such.
I can see how it's a moral grey area to namedrop games in an advertisement like that too. Imagine NVIDIA printing some game's art on a GPU box. They should've just logged you into Steam/Epic/GOG and let you do your thing.
> PC VIDEO CARD USAGE BY MFG during FEBRUARY 2022 - JULY 2023
> 15.93% AMD
> 74.69% Nvidia
I can't find any solid numbers on the percentage of PCs with dedicated GPUs, but I'd be very surprised if it was anywhere near that figure.
Steam says that users in Linux have a overwhelming majority of AMD and Intel GPUs [1]:
- number 1 GPU is AMD VANGOGH Steam Deck APU with 42.05% by itself;
- top 10 Nvidia GPUs have only 9.54%;
- top 10 "not Steam Deck APU, not Nvidia" GPUs are 26.64% of the market, so almost outnumber them 2.8-to-1;
1 nvidia discrete GPU
1 ATI discrete GPU (it almost certainly isn't supported as it's too old to work with the open-source AMD drivers)
5 different intel iGPUs (1 NUC, one mITX, and 3 laptops, because WTF do I need a discrete GPU in a laptop for).
- One was built before AMD sold GPUs.
- One was built in a time in which AMD GPUs ran much hotter than Nvidia GPUs at the same performance level, so I would have only bought one if I was more price sensitive.