The comments I’ve read from current-generation Arc owners have given the impression that their Linux drivers are catching up to AMD. Here’s the latest info:
Been a while but I played around with the a770 in Arch for a few months. It didn’t play nice with proton and even native games were hit and miss. Better support from Intel than nvidia gives, but it’s a new platform and Linux development was definitely taking a back seat to the windows drivers which were also a buggy mess.
And basically nobody had the cards so if something didn’t work your options were to give up or become a computer graphics programming wizard and fix it all yourself from scratch.
To answer the question: not really, no. The drivers themselves may have been fine, but who knows how any given software will handle a brand new GPU architecture.
As an aside knowing most companies working in embedded technologies usually work in, or have strong aspects in Linux. Why then are Linux drivers so difficult to come by? Lack of customers seems unlikely since they mostly have everything ready, right? Or is it cost cutting to avoid lengthy QA on another platform? That would be easy to sidestep by giving a no-warranty driver version?
Most of the demand is for Windows. So if your choice is to spend resources (money) where demand is, or hope that you can possibly create demand where there isn’t any currently.
Do these cards have good open-source Linux drivers?
The comments I’ve read from current-generation Arc owners have given the impression that their Linux drivers are catching up to AMD. Here’s the latest info:
https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-battlemage
Been a while but I played around with the a770 in Arch for a few months. It didn’t play nice with proton and even native games were hit and miss. Better support from Intel than nvidia gives, but it’s a new platform and Linux development was definitely taking a back seat to the windows drivers which were also a buggy mess.
And basically nobody had the cards so if something didn’t work your options were to give up or become a computer graphics programming wizard and fix it all yourself from scratch.
To answer the question: not really, no. The drivers themselves may have been fine, but who knows how any given software will handle a brand new GPU architecture.
As an aside knowing most companies working in embedded technologies usually work in, or have strong aspects in Linux. Why then are Linux drivers so difficult to come by? Lack of customers seems unlikely since they mostly have everything ready, right? Or is it cost cutting to avoid lengthy QA on another platform? That would be easy to sidestep by giving a no-warranty driver version?
Most of the demand is for Windows. So if your choice is to spend resources (money) where demand is, or hope that you can possibly create demand where there isn’t any currently.
They keep getting removed from the kernel.