doesn’t quite fit the limitations stated on the download page
> * AMD Radeon RX 400 series or newer GPU required
> * Nvidia and Intel GPUs are not supported
> * hybrid graphics are not supported
> * virtual machines are not supported
Definitely a reasonable question. Personally I would answer that by asking, “who uses intel for gaming”? Currently, very few, even less than AMD (lmao). Meaning the devs likely just don’t have one and can’t make any promises. I bet if someone bought them one they’d appreciate it ;)
I haven’t been following the arc cards very closely, but my loose impression was the drivers were heavily in flux until recently, and I’ve seen complications pop up in regards to mixtures of bios/uefi options, such as resizable bar being crucial for performance and some virtualization options causing incompatibility or performance issues. Basically the dust is still settling.
As such it’s hard to say “yeah this should work”.
I do think they should list the reasons why certain things are “not supported*, what “not supported” actually means, and not bury these surprises. Otherwise it guarantees confusion and (my wild but good faith) speculation.
The Arc cards are pretty good for DX12/Vulkan games, but pretty bad at DX9/11 games.
Luckily, the most popular Linux translation layers translate DX9/11 games into Vulkan. In fact, Intel is using such a translation layer on Windows and has significantly improved its performance that way.
The biggest issue still standing seems to be the lack of sparse resources support, but the Intel driver seems to be faking support to prevent games that don't actually use it from crashing in an upcoming update, fixing games like Elden Ring.
I think it's not a bad choice for an affordable Linux gaming rig depending on the games you play. Perhaps it's better to wait for Battlemage first, though. There's still a lot of tooling centered around AMD and Nvidia cards and the Intel drivers still aren't where they need to be if you need to play certain games.
Yeah just I noticed a few recent benchmarks and was kinda surprised. I definitely need to give them a better look.
That said, my own use case is a hilariously overcomplicated VM setup. I archive stuff for myself and help with other archival projects as a hobby, I realized the epyc machine I got for the PCIe lanes is basically perfect for sticking my “desktop” on a numa node and passing an AMD rx 6700xt. Host is currently proxmox, eventually moving to NixOS.
As such an important factor for me is good VFIO compatibility. AMD was supposed to be “it”, but they still have bizarre reset bugs show up in some of their latest models and have gone radio silent on the issue. My own reference card works fortunately, but there’s little telling if another kind will or not. And nvidia has all the typical out of kernel problems while the new drivers mature, but doesn’t have reset issues. Also I dislike Nvidia somewhat more than intel.
When I’m back on the market in a few years that will be the deciding factor. I’m definitely not a typical target market though.
The new Intel GPUs supposedly deliver pretty good value for money, they're around a geforce 1080 in performance or something? So that number might be increasing.
You can play a lot of indie games perfectly fine on integrated hardware
Ok, nVidia and it’s drivers - quite quirky, I know. I happen to have an AMD laptop nowadays but most of my life I had Intel (which felt very good although not powerful) and this sounds wild to me it wouldn't be sufficient to play a NES game.
Seems odd too. I'm not sure why it wouldn't support Nvidia cards. The open-source Nouveau drivers for Nvidia cards has been in the mainline kernel for years now. Most Nvidia cards just work out of the box now in Linux.
This is changing! NVIDIA has started modifying their driver architecture to support open-sourcing their drivers, much like AMD did years ago. As part of this process, they've released updates firmwares for newer cards which support re-clocking, which could finally allow Nouveau to run newer NVIDIA GPUs at full speed.
For AMD, lots of people game on the community open-source drivers in Mesa. Presumably the same could be true for NVIDIA in the future.
It's definitely not up for AAA gaming but it's not horrible either. But why restrict Nvidia cards altogether when nouveau already supported by the kernel? Obviously it would be a stop-gap solution until proper support for the proprietary drivers is integrated but people like me can't run Chimera right now. I wouldn't mind trying it but I can't.
> It's definitely not up for AAA gaming but it's not horrible either.
Granted I don't have a recent GPU (1050Ti), but nouveau has been unable to run plasma with compositing enabled reliably for more than about 10 days straight on that system. Sometimes I can clear up the issues by forcing a mode-switch, othertimes it requires I restart Xorg, othertimes a reboot is needed. I should note I gave up on it in late 2021, so things may have improved in that time.
ChimeraOS carried nvidia drivers for years. The issue is that Valve's Gamescope, which is now a requirement for Steam doesn't run well on the nvidia drivers, and old big picture mode got retired.
*A gaming console with the most restrictive library around because we played our cards wrong and advertised it as running these games and not just mostly any game on steam so some game publishers and developers got really upset they weren't asked.
Shadow gets away with it just fine (still do not recommend, Haswell CPUs in 2023 for that monthly price are a joke they only tell you about afterwards). NVIDIA made the mistake of advertising games as "working on GeForce Now" and restricting what runs in their cloud in the first place - probably out of fear someone would run a miner instead of games.
Activation limits were extremely unpopular during their time 10-15 years ago and have mostly been removed from old games. I don't think that's coming back. They really have no reason to object to their game being run from Stream/Epic either. The main complainant back then was from Hinterland (who make The Long Dark) who was more morally outraged than concerned with lost revenue or such.
I can see how it's a moral grey area to namedrop games in an advertisement like that too. Imagine NVIDIA printing some game's art on a GPU box. They should've just logged you into Steam/Epic/GOG and let you do your thing.
Geforce Now arbitrarily restricts their games by platform at the request of the publisher. E.g. you can't play Genshin in a browser, only the Android and Windows native apps.
Funny because AMD probably has the lowest share of the three if we include all PCs including office ones (and we should since the website says "any PC")
And that's only for people who run Steam, who are likely to have high-end cards. This is, it does not include PCs for office workloads or most laptops. Intel is at 9% right now in that Steam survey so the real number is much, much higher than AMD (and perhaps nvidia too). This makes AMD the third one in user share.
If we're counting integrated graphics in this, then AMD probably ain't anywhere close to being in 3rd. Between AMD and Intel, AMD's at around 35-40% of the CPU market (per https://www.statista.com/statistics/735904/worldwide-x86-int...), and most of those are probably going to be APUs or otherwise have an integrated GPU.
I can't find any solid numbers on the percentage of PCs with dedicated GPUs, but I'd be very surprised if it was anywhere near that figure.
> Funny because AMD probably has the lowest share of the three if we include all PCs including office ones (and we should since the website says "any PC").
Steam says that users in Linux have a overwhelming majority of AMD and Intel GPUs [1]:
- number 1 GPU is AMD VANGOGH Steam Deck APU with 42.05% by itself;
- top 10 Nvidia GPUs have only 9.54%;
- top 10 "not Steam Deck APU, not Nvidia" GPUs are 26.64% of the market, so almost outnumber them 2.8-to-1;
- 5 of them have no need for discrete graphics; of those 3 are laptops, which (for many years) were basically going to be intel CPUs unless you go out of your way to buy AMD. One other is a NUC (I wanted the Pulse8 CEC module which is available internally only for NUCs), and the last one is used largely as a server; the only low-power mITX board I could find that supported ECC was a Xeon-D.
- One was built before AMD sold GPUs.
- One was built in a time in which AMD GPUs ran much hotter than Nvidia GPUs at the same performance level, so I would have only bought one if I was more price sensitive.
> Instantly turn any PC into a gaming console
doesn’t quite fit the limitations stated on the download page
> * AMD Radeon RX 400 series or newer GPU required > * Nvidia and Intel GPUs are not supported > * hybrid graphics are not supported > * virtual machines are not supported