I mean so long as it’s a decent enough card, people will buy it. The arc cards we already got have some pretty solid price/performance, at least after the drivers got improved.
Its performance and driver situation might not be as great as AMD and Nvidia at the moment, but at least it works. At the very least still miles ahead of Moore Threads GPUs, which released around the same time.
The A770 is actually fantastic, even more so for the price.
What was garbage was the drivers and they've come a long way in bringing them up to speed.
They had and to some extent still have a rather gigantic hurdle to cross getting older games up to speed, but the decision to employ at least partial Vulkan translation instead of trying to get DX9/10 drivers up to speed was a huge leap already.
For modern games, when they are at least tested to run on the Intel cards, they perform on par with cards from AMD and Nvidia that cost $150+ more.
And no, this isn't coming from some Intel fanboy, I haven't bought an Intel CPU since Coppermine and for GPUs I've simply switched between what was the best for a specific priceclass at the time I upgraded. And whenever something really new came along, like Kyro3D and PhysX cards (and now Intels GPUs), I bought those too.
Also realize that Arcs ray tracing engine beats AMDs and keeps up with Nvidias in their first iteration of the chip.
Their tech is sound and fully has the potential to be a competitor.
Can you give advice about if arc gpus are a good choice for linux pcs? I'm planning to build a pc with my so and it will be her first linux machine (probably linux mint debian if relevant). She's tech savy but not the kind that fiddles with driver problems for hours, so it should work more or less out of the box. My reference is the rx 6700xt that I have at my garuda (arch) that runs genrally fine with minor sound bugs (hdmi).
I don’t have any experience with any brand other than AMD on Linux, but my understanding is that anything other than AMD dGPUs are a crapshoot if you’re wanting any more than display out.
Arc looks great, but the drivers are barely okay at Windows. I doubt 3D works acceptably in Linux.
Given Arc’s relative performance, for Linux grab a 6600-6600XT-6650XT-7600-6700-6700XT and call it a day. Don’t think too hard about it.
EDIT: I just re-read your comment and realized you were asking specifically about Intel Arc cards. Sorry I don’t have any experience with them. I’ll leave this comment here though in case it’s useful in some way.
Everyone seems to always recommend AMD cards for Linux but at least in my experience I’ve had no issues with Nvidia cards. I have a 1070 in my home Proxmox server passed through to a Debian transcoding for Plex and Jellyfin, and in my gaming machine I dual boot Debian and my 4090 works just fine so far (including HDMI sound). I just installed the latest drivers on both machines and they “just worked”.
I don’t personally have any issues with using proprietary drivers, but I understand why people prefer AMD for the open source drivers if that’s important to them. I just wanted to chime in with my experience because a lot of people will outright dismiss Nvidia cards for Linux saying they don’t work well, regardless of the politics of the drivers. At least for me they work fine.
i don't remember them ever saying that about Arc. i distinctly remember several of Intel's people saying it would probably take a gen or two for them to be competitive.
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