Looking for recent experiences with Intel Arc graphics on Linux

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Hello.

I will be building a new computer soon and I am seriously considering buying an Intel Arc A750. I am aware the drivers weren’t exactly stellar when the Arc video cards first launched but I have heard there have been big improvements.

I will be using the computer for both work (2D animation, and a bit of 3D in Blender) and playing games.

I was hoping anyone who owns an Arc card could share their experiences with me. How good are the drivers now? Do you regret buying it? Would you pick another video card in a similar price bracket? Is the driver update quality consistent (should I expect a driver update to randomly reduce performance?). Will everything work out of the box or will I have to install additional drivers?

I also heard the Arc cards have unusually high idle power consumption. Is this true?

Thanks in advance.

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This is actually an interesting topic, and one that I am attempting to cover in my Blender Corner Blender Creators Unite ! | The Blender Watercooler of the “Fedora-Verse”, Intel uses OneAPI for it’s compute workloads.

There are too few creators using Blender with Intel and OneApi on Linux at the moment to properly understand usability. Using the Blender Flatpak with Intel GPU ( iGPU, ARC ) does not work. There is no support for Intel compute in the FreeDesktop runtime and no sdk available.

  • Please do not take the experience of a random Void Linux user as a usecase to purchase hardware for such a task.

So for me 2D / 3D workloads are unfortunately AMD ( .rpm only ) / and Nvidia.

If this is a hobby, and you are willing to make sacrifices, then maybe. . .
If you like your hobby, want to get better and enjoy what you do, you have to go with the tried and true solution.

I have seen a couple Laptop users here with All Intel builds, but none were creators/creative/gamers. Hope some will step up and speak on their use case and experiences.

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Good to know.

I did some more research into the high power draw when idle and it seems like that’s true, even Intel acknowledges it: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000092564/graphics.html
They recommend changing an “ASPM (Active state power management)” setting in the bios to fix this. The problem is, the motherboard I plan to buy does not seem to support it? At least I saw no mention of it in the manual. I also looked at other “budget” AM5 boards from various manufacturers and they didn’t have it either… Is this something only available on Intel motherboards?

Apparently the video cards can draw up to 40W just idling without this setting adjusted… that’s a lot. I may have to go with AMD.

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Just want to update that I ended up not buying an Intel GPU, the high power draw scared me haha