Today the embargo lifts on reviews of the Intel Arc Graphics A750 and A770 graphics cards ahead of their retail availability set for next week. I've had the A750 and A770 at Phoronix the past week and today can share initial performance figures on these Intel DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics cards under Linux with their open-source driver stack.

Going into this testing it was very easy to get the Arc Graphics A750/A770 up and running under Linux given my past experience after purchasing two Arc Graphics A380 graphics cards. My guide from August around Intel Arc Graphics Running On Fully Open-Source Linux Driver holds equally true for the Arc Graphics A750/A770. To run these high-end Arc dGPUs on Linux, you need to be using Linux 6.0 or later, linux-firmware.git, and Mesa 22.2 or later -- but ideally be running Mesa 22.3-devel Git due to the continued flow of OpenGL and Vulkan driver enhancements. Beyond those latest components, as of Linux 6.0 and still for 6.1/DRM-Next you need to be using the i915.force_probe module parameter in order to enable the DG2/Alchemist accelerated support since it isn't yet declared stable/officially supported. So it's easy to get going and can be using all mainline bits of the latest open-source upstream components and then just the one nuisance around needing to use the i915.force_probe override.

For OpenCL and Level Zero support, besides needing the above-mentioned components, the latest Intel Compute-Runtime on GitHub along with associated GitHub components like Level-Zero and the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) can be easily installed with the Ubuntu packages or built from source for the compute stack.

Running the Arc Graphics A750 and A770 with Linux 6.0 from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA and Mesa 22.3-devel from the Oibaf PPA was the focus for my launch-day testing given just one week so far for trying out these cards. Overall it was a stable experience with hitting hangs primarily with F1 2021 and occasionally in Shadow of the Tomb Raider but as a whole was a better experience than anticipated with being used to early stage open-source driver support for new GPUs over the past 18+ years covering this area on Phoronix.

Running Mesa 22.3-devel is also important as Vulkan ray-tracing support was just recently enabled there. But even still some games out there -- some Steam Play titles -- simply won't run yet with the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver. Among the few unimplemented features is the Vulkan sparse support needed for some VKD3D-Proton games like DIRT 5, Deathloop, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, Forza Horizon 4/5, and other modern titles. Hopefully those remaining Vulkan items will get squared away for the Intel Vulkan driver.

When it comes to Intel's "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL driver, it was actually in great shape. Over the summer were various stories how the Intel Arc Graphics with OpenGL on Windows wasn't in the best of shape with Intel focusing on newer Direct3D 12 support. Well, on Linux, the Intel OpenGL driver is in great shape. As some of these benchmarks show, for games/applications on Linux still using OpenGL, the Arc Graphics performance was rather competitive here against the AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.