I kept reading in the kernel patch dev notes for 6.13 and saw how there's a fix coming through for the memory efficiency for the a series of intel arc gpus, along with the retirement of the i915 driver and replacement with the Xe driver. I'm desperately hoping that the memory controller improvement provides a major uplift in Intel's emulation of double-precision floating point performance on the arc series. I'm pretty convinced that this is one of the true weak points of the a series and what feels like is holding my a770 back from performing past the b580 right now. I have a lot of games where I can't make use of the full vram module and will have a lot of nasty 1% lows, both on Windows 11 24h2 and on Fedora 41 - kernel 6.12.5. I'm hoping they pull through on the a series architecture and don't abandon it because of the ground-up redesign they did with Xe2 and battlemage. I see there being a lot of potential for testing for later drivers and later architecture left on the table if they abandon the a series. They're still good right now, but have the potential to age like fine wine in my eyes with that 16 gb of gddr6 ram and a 256 bit bus. Considering Nvidia has already announced that their next AI trick is going to focus on compressing data output to smooth out the inconsistencies from low clock speeds or knee-capped vram buffers in their "budget" tier cards, the gap has narrowed within two gens. Intel and AMD will likely have their answer to that software trick in the coming months, closing the gap and leaving the hardware and stability/performance development of the drivers as what's left on the table. Nvidia has kneecapped their hardware offerings yet again, and AMD announced that they're not going to release a competitor to the 5090. AMD is capable of doing better, but own the entire home and pc handheld market demand for APUs. They're likely avoiding a monopoly case like the ones Nvidia is facing by holding back (especially considering their gpu they produced for the Mac Pro machine years ago nearly beat out the 3090 ti at the time. Intel entering the gpu space with a solid price to performance offering and continuing to advance and develop their drivers and software needs to happen. Intel's enthusiast cpus have fallen behind AMD for yet another gen. Their gpus having such a good response should send a signal back to Intel's failing commercial end; they need to change, and these gpus have the potential to save their commercial interest. But that's enough of my yapping. Great video! I hope that the arc a770 ages well like I'm anticipating and will pull through with a performance jump on the new drivers and memory control update like they claim is happening.
Hmm, in what context are the devs saying that the i915 will be retired? i915 isn't a driver for what became and obscure platform like Itanium, it's the driver for many generations of igpus that are in use countless systems today, it's kind of the backbone of why machines like old thinkpads are preferred for linux users of all levels of experience, not to mention homelabbers and people with media servers. Xe will only be supporting Tigerlake and forward. Have you taken a look at the Xe - Merge Acceptance Plan on kernel dot org slash next? They don't give a definitive timeline but it doesn't seem the devs necessarily plan on abandoning Alchemist soon, though this is a bit of a reason why I made this video. I see these updates as a sign that they will be continuing working on support for Alchemist, but I could be wrong, and will continue to check in on this in case they don't make an explicit announcement. I don't know if you've seen some of the interviews a higher up at AMD had with, iirc, Tom's Hardware regarding UDNA and the future of compute on consumer GPUs... I was considering talking about that in the Mac Studio video I published about a month ago but thought the video would be too long. Maybe I'll make a separate video on the topic. Don't call this 'yapping,' I appreciate the thoughtful comment, I just don't know if youtube comments is the ideal place to post these long responses 😁
Btw, is it just me or is gaming and a lot of hardware issues on Intel Arc's A series just kind of non-existent on Linux? I've had far less issues with Arc on Linux than I've had on Windows. I've had graphic artifacting bugs, bugs that made games impossible to play, and bugs that would just crash my programs if there was a memory controller issue on Windows 11. On Linux? The only bugs I have are usually on my laptop's boot hardware. My desktop that houses the A770 almost never has issues on Linux. The majority of my Linux issues are with Discord and other software devs and their slow implementation of Wayland. Arc is leagues and bounds better on Linux imo.
@@TimothyDuran It depends on what you're doing/playing with your Arc card. Games with certain features (DX12/Unreal Engine 5 in most cases) that don't even seem to start. Maybe (hopefully) that's changed with Battlemage.
You’re free to feel as you like. I’m just sharing my opinion and while I hope this video informs, at the end of the day, what matters most is what you get out of what you have. The timeframe definitely has been a long one compared to the gaming experience you can get on a radeon card, though make sure to do further research and look up how the 7000 series is performing on linux. I’ve been surprised seeing how long it took for drivers to support them, but its been months since I’ve checked in on that and things might’ve improved. Thanks for watching and commenting
@@CompellingBytes Yes, ive done my research. Im kinda getting tired of the waiting game and not really much hope coming from intel on alchemist cards as quoting a guy working in intel, "It won't ever get media support (xe driver) because of their refusal to implement the jank of how firmware is loaded on Alchemist." I really would like to abstain from getting something like the 7600xt, since its just a 7600 with 16gb's of vram after all. Would be losing the bus width and some theoritical performance, whatever that means. I cant get a 7700xt since its too expensive! (even used..) I guess i'll just live with it for now, and see if battlemage proves itself on linux. Best hopes.
@15placekdwell i wish I had my b580 in hand to work on a video to help you make a more informed decision but I’m not scheduled to receive it til Monday. The other comment in this thread is claiming that i915 is being retired next kernel release else, and that’s pretty concerning to me, because I won’t be able to easily record this content using alchemist. I’ve read documentation, though I don’t remember which document it was at the moment (I’ve been meaning to make a community post on the issue), that stated that i915 would be receiving updates parallel to Xe for the near future. I actually used i915 for this video, and I kinda regret I didn’t mention that in this video now. Though Xe is supposed to be default with 6.12, in the two instances I’ve upgraded to Kernel 6.12 with my A770 has defaulted to i915, and I had to blacklist i915 to get Xe to work. Remember theres a Xe portion to the Mesa Driver and has been the default since this summer or so and there doesnt appear to be an issue using it with the i915 kernel driver, assuming thats whats being used when I run things. Could I ask if there are any games you’d like to see tested on the B580? I can’t guarantee I’ll have all or any of them but I’ll see what I can do, especially since the game sales start soon.
@@Fesovika You have to blacklist i915 and then it seems you have to add the new firmware stuff from the Linux kernel site to get an Alchemist card to work with Xe on 6.12. Its the same performance, and you lose the encode/decode functionality of the card so I don't think all the extra work isn't worth it for an Alchemist card. What's worth trying is seeing about updating Mesa, but take heed to the warning I made in the video. What you see in the video is me using the newest Mesa, at least the newest Mesa up until December 7th.
Unfortunately I don't have the skills to do that sort of thing, especially on my own. Have you tried enabling ASPM in your BIOS (technically UEFI) to achieve lower idle wattage? Also, I've read that you can lower idle usage by turning off your monitor(s), assuming you don't ever turn your computer off.
I kept reading in the kernel patch dev notes for 6.13 and saw how there's a fix coming through for the memory efficiency for the a series of intel arc gpus, along with the retirement of the i915 driver and replacement with the Xe driver. I'm desperately hoping that the memory controller improvement provides a major uplift in Intel's emulation of double-precision floating point performance on the arc series. I'm pretty convinced that this is one of the true weak points of the a series and what feels like is holding my a770 back from performing past the b580 right now. I have a lot of games where I can't make use of the full vram module and will have a lot of nasty 1% lows, both on Windows 11 24h2 and on Fedora 41 - kernel 6.12.5. I'm hoping they pull through on the a series architecture and don't abandon it because of the ground-up redesign they did with Xe2 and battlemage. I see there being a lot of potential for testing for later drivers and later architecture left on the table if they abandon the a series. They're still good right now, but have the potential to age like fine wine in my eyes with that 16 gb of gddr6 ram and a 256 bit bus. Considering Nvidia has already announced that their next AI trick is going to focus on compressing data output to smooth out the inconsistencies from low clock speeds or knee-capped vram buffers in their "budget" tier cards, the gap has narrowed within two gens. Intel and AMD will likely have their answer to that software trick in the coming months, closing the gap and leaving the hardware and stability/performance development of the drivers as what's left on the table.
Nvidia has kneecapped their hardware offerings yet again, and AMD announced that they're not going to release a competitor to the 5090. AMD is capable of doing better, but own the entire home and pc handheld market demand for APUs. They're likely avoiding a monopoly case like the ones Nvidia is facing by holding back (especially considering their gpu they produced for the Mac Pro machine years ago nearly beat out the 3090 ti at the time. Intel entering the gpu space with a solid price to performance offering and continuing to advance and develop their drivers and software needs to happen. Intel's enthusiast cpus have fallen behind AMD for yet another gen. Their gpus having such a good response should send a signal back to Intel's failing commercial end; they need to change, and these gpus have the potential to save their commercial interest.
But that's enough of my yapping. Great video! I hope that the arc a770 ages well like I'm anticipating and will pull through with a performance jump on the new drivers and memory control update like they claim is happening.
Hmm, in what context are the devs saying that the i915 will be retired? i915 isn't a driver for what became and obscure platform like Itanium, it's the driver for many generations of igpus that are in use countless systems today, it's kind of the backbone of why machines like old thinkpads are preferred for linux users of all levels of experience, not to mention homelabbers and people with media servers. Xe will only be supporting Tigerlake and forward.
Have you taken a look at the Xe - Merge Acceptance Plan on kernel dot org slash next? They don't give a definitive timeline but it doesn't seem the devs necessarily plan on abandoning Alchemist soon, though this is a bit of a reason why I made this video. I see these updates as a sign that they will be continuing working on support for Alchemist, but I could be wrong, and will continue to check in on this in case they don't make an explicit announcement.
I don't know if you've seen some of the interviews a higher up at AMD had with, iirc, Tom's Hardware regarding UDNA and the future of compute on consumer GPUs... I was considering talking about that in the Mac Studio video I published about a month ago but thought the video would be too long. Maybe I'll make a separate video on the topic.
Don't call this 'yapping,' I appreciate the thoughtful comment, I just don't know if youtube comments is the ideal place to post these long responses 😁
Btw, is it just me or is gaming and a lot of hardware issues on Intel Arc's A series just kind of non-existent on Linux? I've had far less issues with Arc on Linux than I've had on Windows. I've had graphic artifacting bugs, bugs that made games impossible to play, and bugs that would just crash my programs if there was a memory controller issue on Windows 11. On Linux? The only bugs I have are usually on my laptop's boot hardware. My desktop that houses the A770 almost never has issues on Linux. The majority of my Linux issues are with Discord and other software devs and their slow implementation of Wayland. Arc is leagues and bounds better on Linux imo.
@@TimothyDuran It depends on what you're doing/playing with your Arc card. Games with certain features (DX12/Unreal Engine 5 in most cases) that don't even seem to start. Maybe (hopefully) that's changed with Battlemage.
im pessimistic about the a770, thinking about selling my bifrost a770 and getting a 7600xt or 7700xt depending on how much it costs in my country
You’re free to feel as you like. I’m just sharing my opinion and while I hope this video informs, at the end of the day, what matters most is what you get out of what you have.
The timeframe definitely has been a long one compared to the gaming experience you can get on a radeon card, though make sure to do further research and look up how the 7000 series is performing on linux. I’ve been surprised seeing how long it took for drivers to support them, but its been months since I’ve checked in on that and things might’ve improved.
Thanks for watching and commenting
@@CompellingBytes Yes, ive done my research. Im kinda getting tired of the waiting game and not really much hope coming from intel on alchemist cards as quoting a guy working in intel, "It won't ever get media support (xe driver) because of their refusal to implement the jank of how firmware is loaded on Alchemist." I really would like to abstain from getting something like the 7600xt, since its just a 7600 with 16gb's of vram after all. Would be losing the bus width and some theoritical performance, whatever that means.
I cant get a 7700xt since its too expensive! (even used..) I guess i'll just live with it for now, and see if battlemage proves itself on linux. Best hopes.
@15placekdwell i wish I had my b580 in hand to work on a video to help you make a more informed decision but I’m not scheduled to receive it til Monday.
The other comment in this thread is claiming that i915 is being retired next kernel release else, and that’s pretty concerning to me, because I won’t be able to easily record this content using alchemist.
I’ve read documentation, though I don’t remember which document it was at the moment (I’ve been meaning to make a community post on the issue), that stated that i915 would be receiving updates parallel to Xe for the near future.
I actually used i915 for this video, and I kinda regret I didn’t mention that in this video now.
Though Xe is supposed to be default with 6.12, in the two instances I’ve upgraded to Kernel 6.12 with my A770 has defaulted to i915, and I had to blacklist i915 to get Xe to work.
Remember theres a Xe portion to the Mesa Driver and has been the default since this summer or so and there doesnt appear to be an issue using it with the i915 kernel driver, assuming thats whats being used when I run things.
Could I ask if there are any games you’d like to see tested
on the B580? I can’t guarantee I’ll have all or any of them but I’ll see what I can do, especially since the game sales start soon.
@@CompellingByteshow to set xe permanently ? I have i915 in use as well on 6.12😢
@@Fesovika You have to blacklist i915 and then it seems you have to add the new firmware stuff from the Linux kernel site to get an Alchemist card to work with Xe on 6.12. Its the same performance, and you lose the encode/decode functionality of the card so I don't think all the extra work isn't worth it for an Alchemist card. What's worth trying is seeing about updating Mesa, but take heed to the warning I made in the video.
What you see in the video is me using the newest Mesa, at least the newest Mesa up until December 7th.
would you recommend the b580 over the a770?
Don’t buy either right now if youre using Linux. Maybe the b580 in a couple of months
can you help making workaround to lower the arc a770 idle wattage? mine around 40-50 watt :(
Unfortunately I don't have the skills to do that sort of thing, especially on my own. Have you tried enabling ASPM in your BIOS (technically UEFI) to achieve lower idle wattage? Also, I've read that you can lower idle usage by turning off your monitor(s), assuming you don't ever turn your computer off.