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Comment by treve | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if these GPUs are good options for Linux rigs and if first-party drivers are made.

Been running Linux on the A770 for about 2 years now. Very happy with the driver situation. Was a bit rough very early on, but it's nice and stable now. Recommend at least Linux 6.4, but preferably newer. I use a rolling release distro(Artix) to get up to date kernels.

ML stuff can be a pain sometimes because support in pytorch and various other libraries is not as prioritised as CUDA. But I've been able to get llama.cpp working via ollama, which has experimental intel gpu support. Worked fine when I tested it, though I haven't actually used it very much, so don't quote me on it.

For image gen, your best bet is to use sdnext(https://github.com/vladmandic/sdnext), which supports Intel on linux officially, and will automagically install the right pytorch version, and do a bunch of trickery to get libraries that insist on CUDA to work in many of the cases. Though some things are still unsupported due to various libraries still not supporting intel on Linux. Some types of quantization are unavailable for instance. But at least if you have the A770, quantisation for image gen is not as important due to plentyful VRAM, unless you're trying to use the flux models.

I also have an A770. Don't use it for AI, but it runs fine for general 3D use (which mostly means either Minecraft, other similarly casual games, or demoscene shaders). I'm pretty sure I'm not utilizing it fully most of the time.

My main complaint is that the fan control just doesn't work. They stay at low speed or off no matter how hot the card gets, until it shuts down due to overheating. Apparently there's a firmware update to fix this, but you need Windows to flash it. You can zip-tie a spare fan somewhere pointing at the card...

Secondary complaint is that it's somehow not compatible with Linux's early boot console, so there's no graphical output until the driver is loaded. You'd better have ssh enabled while setting it up.

It's also incompatible with MBR/BIOS boot since it doesn't include an option ROM or whatever is needed to make that work - so I switched to UEFI (which I thought I was already using).

When I ran a shader "competition" some people's code with undefined behaviour ran differently on my GPU than theirs. That's unavoidable regardless of brand and not an Intel thing at all.

Yes, first party drivers are made. Upstream Linux and mesa project should have good support in their latest releases. If you're running a non-bleeding edge distro, you may need to wait or do a little leg work to get the newer versions of things, but this is not unusual for new hardware.

If you're running Ubuntu, Intel has some exact steps you can follow: https://dgpu-docs.intel.com/driver/client/overview.html

In fact, Intel has been a stellar contributor to the Linux kernel and associated projects, compared to all other vendors. They usually have launch day Linux support provided that you are running a bleeding edge Linux kernel.

Of all the god awful Linux GPU drivers Intel's are the least awful IME. Unless you're talking purely compute, then nvidia, have fun matching those cuda versions though...

AMD's Linux drivers are pretty good. I get better performance playing games through Proton on Linux than I do playing the same games on Windows, despite whatever overhead the translation adds.

The only really annoying bug I've run into is the one where the system locks up if you go to sleep with more used swap space than free memory, but that one just got fixed.

I use an Alchemist series A380 on my nix media server, but it's absolutely fantastic for video encoding.

Same; recently built SFF with low profile A310. Goes through video streams like hot knife through butter.

Do you have your config posted somewhere? I'd be interested to compare notes

Not particularly, no. I mainly followed the Jellyfin setup (https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-ac...) and tweaked some things like fan speeds to my preferences. General linuxserver.io containers, and ITX.

Got it. I went native; NixOS wiki has an example of an overlay

I have always associated Intel iGPUs with good drivers but people seem to often complain about their Linux dGPU drivers in these threads. I hope it is just an issue of them trying to break into a new field, rather than a slipping of their GPU drivers in general…

Intel switched over to a new driver for dGPUs and any iGPU newer than Skylake(?).

The newest beta-ish driver is Xe, the main driver is Intel HD, and the old driver is i915.

People complaining experienced the teething issues of early Xe builds.

i915 is still the main kernel mode driver on Linux for every Intel GPUs up to Alchemist. xe kmd is used by Battlemage by default (as of 6.12).

There's a Mesa DRI driver, called i965 (originally made for Broadwater chipset, thus the 965 numbering), which has since been replaced by either:

- Crocus for anything up to Broadwell (Gen 8)

- Iris for anything from Broadwell and newer

Then there's a Video Acceleration driver, which is (also) called i965. I think this is what you're referring to. There are:

- i965 (aka Intel VAAPI Driver), which supports anything from Westmere (Gen 5) to Coffee Lake (Gen 9.5)

- iHD (aka Intel Media Driver), is a newer one, which supports anything from Broadwell (Gen 8)

- libvpl, an even newer one, which supports anything from Tiger Lake (Gen 12) and up

Battlemage users had to use libvpl until recently because Media Driver 2024Q4 with BMG support was only released 2 weeks ago. Using libvpl with ffmpeg may requires rebuilding ffmpeg, as some distro doesn't have it enabled (due to conflict with legacy Intel Media SDK, so you have to choose).

I have B580 for my Linux machine (6.12), and xe seems pretty stable/performant so far.

I am always confused about which drivers need installing to fully enable all hardware acceleration features on Broadwell. Also not all distros maintain the drivers equally resulting in mismatches between the vaapi driver or some other driver.

My rough mental Intel driver matrix is something like this (might not be entirely correct):

    iGPU:

    | Arch                                         | KMD     | DRI (Mesa)  | Vulkan (Mesa)  | VA         |
    | -------------------------------------------- | ------- | ----------- | -------------- | ---------- |
    | <  Broadwater (Gen4)                         | i915    | i915        | N/A            | N/A        |
    | >= Broadwater (Gen4), < Westmere             | i915    | i915        | N/A            | i965       |
    | >= Westmere (Gen5), < Haswell                | i915    | crocus      | N/A            | i965       |
    | >= Haswell (Gen7), < Broadwell               | i915    | crocus      | hasvk          | i965       |
    | == Broadwell (Gen8)                          | i915    | iris/crocus | anv/hasvk      | iHD        |
    | >= Skylake (Gen9), < Tiger Lake              | i915    | iris        | anv            | iHD        |
    | >= Tiger Lake (Xe/Gen12), < Lunar Lake (Xe2) | i915/xe | iris        | anv            | iHD/libvpl |
    | >= Lunar Lake (Xe2)                          | xe      | iris        | anv            | iHD/libvpl |

    dGPU:

    | Arch                                  | KMD     | DRI (Mesa)  | Vulkan (Mesa)  | VA         |
    | ------------------------------------- | ------- | ----------- | -------------- | ---------- |
    | >= DG1 (Xe/Gen12.1), Battlemage (Xe2) | i915/xe | iris        | anv            | iHD/libvpl |
    | >= Battlemage (Xe2)                   | xe      | iris        | anv            | iHD/libvpl |

Usually, KMD/DRI/Vulkan should work as-is if you use a reasonably recent kernel and mesa, but video acceleration sure is a bit of a mess.

Intel GPU drivers have always been terrible. There's so many features that are just broken if you try to actually use them, on top of just generally being extremely slow.

Hell, the B580 is CPU bottlenecked on everything that isn't a 7800x3d or 9800x3d which is insane for a low-midrange GPU.

Intel also have up-streamed their video encoding acceleration support into software like ffmpeg.

Intel Arc gpus also support hardware video encoding for the AV1 codec which even the just released Nvidia 50 series still doesn't support.

This is wrong. AV1 encoding is supported since Nvidia 40 series.

Last year I was doing a livestream for a band. The NVidia encoder on my friend's computer (running Windows) just wouldn't work. We tried in vain to install drivers and random stuff from Nvidia. I pulled out my own machine with Linux and Intel iGPU and not only did it worked flawlessly, but did so on battery and with charge to spare.

On the other hand, I have to keep the driver for the secondary GPU (also intel) blacklisted because last time I tried to use it it was constantly drawing power.

Here are some benchmarks from a few months back. Seems promising. https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-gpu-compute

Whoops - included the wrong link! https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-graphics-linu...

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