Intel's latest Arc Battlemage B580 GPU, while performing well in Windows, seems to have significant room for improvement in Linux. Benchmarks conducted by Phoronix reveal that the B580 actually underperforms compared to the older Arc A770.
The B580, released last week, has received positive reviews overall. However, Phoronix is the first to compare its performance in Linux against Windows. The tests also included the Arc A770 and A580. Surprisingly, the B580 was almost 2% slower than the A770 in Linux across a range of gaming and compute benchmarks. This is despite the B580 being 25% faster in Windows, showing a significant performance shift between operating systems.
Linux Performance Discrepancies
Interestingly, the A770 and A580 actually gained performance in Linux compared to Windows, with improvements of 19% and 20% respectively. In contrast, the B580 was 8% slower in Linux. This points to potential driver issues in Linux for the new Battlemage GPU.
Vulkan vs. OpenGL
A key area of concern seems to be the Vulkan API. In every Vulkan benchmark, the B580 performed worse compared to the older Alchemist GPUs. Even when all three GPUs experienced performance drops with Vulkan, the B580 lost more ground. On the other hand, OpenGL tests were more favorable to the B580.
Game-Specific Performance
Some higher fidelity settings in games also seem to pose challenges for the B580. In Yamagi Quake 2, enabling MSAA and increasing the resolution caused significant performance drops for the B580 compared to the A770 and A580. However, in Counter-Strike 2, the B580 showed higher performance than the Alchemist GPUs, and it was also able to play Hitman 3 without crashing unlike the A770 and A580. Still, these games ran better on Windows.
"There is likely room for improvement since Alchemist GPUs performed better overall in Linux, and they’ve been out for over two years (though, hopefully, it won’t take that long for Intel to patch the B580)."
Future Improvements
Intel has a history of improving its hardware performance in Linux, so there's hope that the Battlemage situation will improve in the coming months. Given the better performance of older Alchemist GPUs, Intel likely has work to do to optimize the B580's drivers.
