So, let me try to make a first post that’s not a support request.
I recently got an A380 and tried playing Grounded as the very first game, which happens to be a DX12 game. Performance was pretty disappointing, but what was even worse that in seemingly random spots in the game, performance would absolutely tank to 1-2fps. Even when turning the settings down to make the game look absolutely pathetic, these slowdowns stayed the same. After some desperate tinkering, I at some point realized there are two different translation layers for DirectX: DXVK for versions 9 to 11, and VKD3D for DX12. I previously didn’t give this much thought and assumed there is just DXVK. Grounded runs in DX12 mode by default, so half the tweaks I tried didn’t even apply in my case. So on a hunch, I researched how to force the game to run on DX11, which immediately solved all my issues: Overall performance increased, and the slowdowns were gone.
Since this is an UE4 game, this was simply done by adding -dx11 -d3d11 as command line switches. It’s supposed to work on any game using that engine.
The root issue seems to be that there are a few Vulkan extensions missing from the Mesa Vulkan driver for Intel Arc (e.g. issue 5003 in mesa’s gitlab), so as long as this is the case, Linux gamers should probably avoid DX12.
I might be shouting into a void here as I didn’t see a single mention of Arc here in the gaming section, but maybe it will help someone in the future when search engines pick up this post.
I think a lot of people are considering Arc for Linux gaming, as Intel’s Linux drivers have a very good track record of long term support and stability. This kind of information is very valuable for people considering Arc, as there’s very little in the news cycle about how well it performs in gaming, and where.
It sounds like there’s still a ways to go for Intel’s linux driver stack, but at the same time, it also sounds like it’s been coming along nicely and will continue to do so.
In my opinion, this is a good post and deserves a biscuit.
How has your experience been with the A380 on Linux in general? It sounds to me like it’s overall a fairly good experience?
I’ve been watching Arc prices and considering one for a media accelerator/transcoding GPU in my fileserver, if they ever hit bargain-bin price tier.(<$30)
ARC, is certainly [still] on the grind, when it comes to support
Some games I do see steady improvements [improved min/low fps]
Some games seem fairly janky/nerfed, but still well useable [SoM, FEAR, RCT]
My only game [atm], giving ARC the finger, is Starship Troopers: Extermination
Everything apart from gaming worked out of the box on Debian testing. Absolutely no surprises. Regarding gaming, I’ve only played Grounded and LiS:TC so far; both games are UE4, so I guess not that great of a sample. Plus, in the past I already got the impression that UE runs really well under Proton.
But still, I didn’t have a single crash so far at 30+ hours playtime (game nor system), so at least it seems they got the driver quality under control. Now it’s mostly implementing the remaining features and working on performance afaict.
Didn’t play with media encoding yet, but hopefully that’s working well too. I’ve used it in the past with the old UHD (pre-Iris/Arc/Alchemist/Xe or whatever the official architecture name is) iGPU to encode h264 and it’s been smooth sailing there.
I’ll try out some more games over the next few weeks (hopefully) and report back if anything is unexpectedly bad (or good).
