So back in 2022 I bought my current PC with Ryzen 7 5800X. At the time my PC had i5 4670 so I had iGPU and GTX970 for PCI passthrough. So when I bought my new PC I had to get a second GPU for the host and because I’ve had great experience with Intel iGPUs I decided to get Intel Arc A380. I needed it just for display and web browsing while my main GPU is passed to the VM. Around the time I got it I switched from Gnome to KDE because of Gnome’s Wayland issues.
Ever since I’ve been having performance issues (lag, stuttering, choppyness) while doing basic desktop things like switching virtual desktops with lots of windows on a virtual desktop or opening the window overview effect. Gnome is a bit better but it’s still not smooth. I didn’t expect a GPU made in 2022 to not be able to handle basic desktop compositor things. Later I bought RX 7800XT and everything works normally as with the GTX970 and the Intel HD4600 back in the day.
Last month I bought Intel Arc B580 to replace the A380 as my host GPU and to my surprise it also has performance issues with basic desktop things. Games and benchmarks work (they also work “normally” on A380) but switching between virtual desktops and the KDE overview effect is really laggy.
The extreme example is having Firefox (or Chrome) open with more than 10 windows (windows not tabs). With 10 windows on a single virtual desktop it gets a little laggy when switching to another and back. With 30+ it gets really laggy. Also a new thing I noticed with the new B580 as I have a lot more windows open now than I had a 2 years ago when I still used the A380 is that if I try to open my Firefox profile with 60+ windows with lots of tabs in them it takes super long time to load and crashes after a minute. All this is under Wayland. I don’t think X11 works at all and I don’t care.
Are the Intel Arc Linux drivers that bad or am I missing something? If this isn’t fixable I’ll probably sell the B580 and buy RX6400 or RX7600 or something.
Obligatory “did you go into your bios and enable 4G decoding/ReBAR”, if not the performance issues are the expected behaviour for Intel arc gpu which requires this setting for advertised performance.
Intel GPUs on my motherboard don’t work at all without all these (except IOMMU) set this way.
The motherboard is Gigabyte X570 AORUS ELITE (EFI (BIOS) ver. F38h, I updated the EFI when I got my A380 because it didn’t work at all with the stock EFI firmware)
Mesa is 26.0.6
Kernel is 7.0.8-arch1-1
(Although these don’t really matter because the problem existed for 2 years)
Sorry to continue hammering away at the obvious… you do not have that pcie slot set to gen 3 by accident in the BIOS?
Is the operating system installation the same between these two cards or did you reinstall at some point? Maybe you have a bad configuration somewhere on your system if it’s been the same installation the whole time.
And, have you tested a known working card in this slot to ensure the slot itself is not somehow damaged?
When I was running a sparkle b580 I noticed if I had a display hooked up to the onboard amd graphics of my 7950 I experienced the same issues that you seem to be having on both my displays. The solution was to disable the on chip gpu and have both monitors hooked directly to the b580 your situation is obviously different but I think the Arc drivers for linux have issues with second gpus in the system and providing outputs. As I have switched to an AMD gpu that issue has gone away on my system and I can have the onboard gpu enabled without issues. I never really dug into the root cause as it was a simple fix for me disabling on board graphics and just using the ARC. Obviously you have a different set of circumstances but it might be related.
If you still have that 970 card, could you try and see if that works, or at least least works better than the ARC card that seems to cause trouble?
At this point, it might be worthwhile to test the slot/board to make sure the board/PCIE slot isn’t damaged.
Can’t help fix, because I’ve never had problems, but…just to partially answer the question: I’ve been running an A770 16GB on my daily driver for a couple of years now, and I’ve never had any of the problems you describe (using GNOME, mind).
Interestingly, I always had desktop lag trouble with Nvidia cards - the A770 was the solution to those problems, without any additional config.
Might I suggest booting from a live USB to tell you whether the problem lies in your OS config or elsewhere?
@daemond The PCIe slots are set to gen 4. The OS (Arch Linux) has not been reinstalled since 2018. I haven’t “tested” another card besides the 2 Intel ones and the AMD. I had the GTX970 plugged in the main PCIx16 slot before I got the 7800XT but that was 3-4 years ago
@bovine I don’t have onboard graphics. The CPU is 5800X. The monitor is plugged to the GPU and not to the motherboard.
@aaronzsh I have no idea why I had it enabled. Must of been confused what PCI bifurcating is. I disabled it now.
Today I tested a few things.
I disabled bifurcation (no idea why I did enable it in the first place)
I installed only the B580. I installed it in the PCIEx16 slot (the main, reinforced one that is connected to the CPU that my 7800XT was in)
The lag from switching virtual desktops was gone running my test Firefox profile with 30 windows open with 1 empty tab in each window (normally it started to get laggy above 15 windows)
Trying to open my main Firefox profile still resulted in system lock up and eventually (after couple of minutes) Firefox crashed
I installed the B580 in the PCIEx16 slot and the 7800XT in the other PCIEx4(the only other x16 slot that is connected to the chipset and runs at x4)
Same result as with only the B580 plugged in
I installed the 7800XT in the PCIEx16 slot and the B580 in the PCIEx4 slot
The lag from switching virtual desktops returned
And of course the main Firefox profile crashes
So I guess the B580 can’t work in the PCIEx4 slot connected to the chipset. And no matter what it can’t handle heavy Firefox usage. That sucks because I’d have to connect the heavy 7800XT to a non-reinforced PCIE slot and I’d block my bottom PCI bracket/hole which I use for USB 2.0 additional ports connected to the USB 2.0 headers at the bottom of the MB.
I guess I’d have to get RX7600 or RX6400 or something for my “weak” GPU.
It’s pretty wild that despite being weaker the Intel Ark GPUs require top PCI connection to work at all and still have problems.
Why are you spending all this money on gpus for display out? Get a cheap low end gen 3 card. It will work great in a 4x4 slot. Something like amd rx550 fits this purpose pretty well at a fraction of the cost…
I’ve also had performance problems with my R9700s plugged into the x4 chipset slot - the extra hop caused a ~40-50% performance degradation with LLM work.
I got the A380 because I thought “It’s basically an Intel iGPU (which I had great experience with before) as an external card. And the B580 I got because I thought that maybe A380 was too weak or something and it’s worth trying it. At the time there were rumors that the GPU prices were going to spike as with the RAM prices and a close friend was considering buying a GPU in the near future so I thought “either I’ll use it or give it to my friend at a normal price if the price spike or sell it if I don’t end up needing it or it doesn’t work for some reason.”.
As for why try Intel Arc in the first place - I wasn’t sure if PRIME would work properly with 2 AMD GPUs and again I had good experience with Intel iGPU in the past.
Well I expected that there may be some performance degradation but not for basic stuff that a 15 year old GPU can handle. Not to mention that the 7800XT works fine in the x4 chipset slot. By fine I mean that normal operations work perfectly and gaming benchmarks don’t have very noticeable performance degradation.
It’s pretty unusual in my opinion, but the performance loss from losing those lanes could certainly be down to the immaturity of the hardware and software supporting it… I wonder if you could find some results from hardware unboxed to confirm what you’re seeing, but I think they only test stuff like pcie gen3x8 for the benefit of older builds rather than more exotic lane configurations like 3x4, 4x4, so on. Maybe someone here has an arc from that generation to test in a lane restricted scenario. Would be interesting to find out.
Did you update the cards bios? The past couple months I’ve gotten three b570s and B580s through the shop and they all had pre-release bios. For a while FWUpdate didn’t support them at all so it was easier to just drop them in a windows test bench to install the driver, since the windows driver installer also updates the cards bios.
I tried Bazzite and Endeavour Live USBs. Endeavour didn’t have stutter/lag but the live USB is running Xorg and not Wayland so this seems to only happen on Wayland and I can’t find a way to switch the Live USB to Wayland. Bazzite still had lag with my test firefox profile with 30 windows open but the lag was less.
I’ll try to install Arch on a USB w/ Wayland to further test things.
No. I only updated my motherboard BIOS to F38h and my A380 BIOS via Intel Graphics Software on Windows when I got it because it didn’t work at all. I’ll try to update the B580 BIOS but judging by the fact that B580 was released 2 years after A380 and has the same problem I don’t expect much to change.
Well when I posted on here asking people input on the cards and Linux before I order them, alot of people posted about bugs and issues that were fixed with a bios update, espcially with UWs. I run dual UWs so I paid attention. Since then I have checked everyone I order in and they all had beta or otherwise pre-relses bios. The windows driver auto updates the bios so the board partners don’t bother updating the assembly lines. The last B570 I had in the shop worked fine in the bazzite installer, then would black screen on boot until I dropped it in windows test bench and updated it. Might not work but it’s worth trying before you ditch the cards.