I’m currently using an AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT 16GB and I don’t planned to change it any time soon. However I have a couple of friends that are entering PC gaming or upgrading their existing rigs and asks a couple of things to me their nerdy friendly PC gamer friends.
Of course they are pretty much all tired of the current Windows bloat, spy and flakyness so we’re looking if their gaming habits and libraries would be a good match for Linux and Proton.
Considering that AMD are the best supported GPU for Linux Gaming and that NVidia is moving away from accessible pricing I was wondering if including Intel Arc would be a good or a bad idea for my proposals. I know it won’t offer the PC MASTER RACE experience but honestly who cares. My friend just wants a cheap but reliable gaming PC to play casually at 1440p or maybe even staying at 1080p. If intel won’t suit I will probably recommend second hand AMD Radeon to fit their budget.
Anyone here have tried some Intel Arc gaming on Linux? What was your experience? Any issues I should be aware? Recommendation? What distro have the best out-of-the-box experience?
Thanks
The B50 was plug and play for me. Obviously not a super powerful card compared to the competitors, however for 16GB of vram in a tiny package (with only 70W of power usage) it’s unbeatable. I did play some games as well, and it was decent enough to get me by for three weeks while my 7900 was getting RMA’d.
at 70 watts does it even need a 6/8 pin plug?
Nope, it gets all of the power from the slot, no pin plug needed!
My friend just upgraded from a GTX 1070 to an ARC B580. His motherboard was pretty old so getting bios updated with resizeable bar was some work. He also chose reinstall with Ubuntu because it was the version of Linux that was listed as officially supported. After that he has been happy with the performance increase he has gotten.
Drivers and such are fine. Performance and such…meh.
They still don’t come close to AMD, and the price isn’t quite distinct enough for people to be drawn from there. Intel is also in the midst of this shakeup with Nvidia injecting cash into the business, and have said they plan to release Intel+Nvidia APU chips to compete with AMD, but that’s not anytime soon.
If they found a good deal on a card, the benchmarks are decisive enough (check Phoronix) at the price point, and they don’t plan on keeping it for 5 years, then sure.
If they find an AMD that is close in price but a great deal more performance, go AMD.
Improved over the last year
https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-b580-opengl-vulkan-eoy2025
How it compares to Windows I wouldn’t know. I did use an Intel Arc for a while on Linux but switched to AMD for performance and idle power draw before the start of 2025. It was stable though with Steam Proton games and general day to day usage. Probably pretty good performance today relative to what it can do on Windows today compared to 2023-2024 when I was using Intel
When I first got the card, Switch emulation did not work. I think it was around mid 2024 when it started to work well
