Intel Arc Alchemist: Xe vs. i915 Driver Performance on Linux 6.19
▼ Summary
– The article compares the performance of Intel’s older i915 and newer Xe kernel drivers for the Intel Arc A580 graphics card on Linux 6.19.
– The Xe driver is Intel’s modern driver designed for newer GPU architectures, offering improvements over the legacy i915 driver.
– For Alchemist and Meteor Lake GPUs, users can optionally switch to the Xe driver using specific kernel module parameters.
– During testing, the Arc A750 and A770 cards were non-functional on Linux 6.19, so the benchmark was limited to the A580.
– The performance comparison used the latest Linux 6.19 Git kernel and Mesa 26.0-devel drivers for both the ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D components.
When comparing the performance of Intel’s two primary graphics drivers on Linux, the choice between the legacy i915 and the modern Xe kernel driver can significantly impact the experience for users of Arc Alchemist and Meteor Lake hardware. This analysis focuses on the Intel Arc Graphics A580, tested on the Linux 6.19 Git kernel with Mesa 26.0-devel, to provide a clear picture of the current state of driver performance for these GPUs.
The Xe driver represents Intel’s forward-looking design, built from the ground up for contemporary GPU architectures and discrete graphics cards. It offers enhanced support for non-x86_64 platforms like ARM64 and RISC-V, along with various technical improvements over the long-standing i915 driver. While Lunar Lake and the upcoming Battlemage hardware will use Xe by default, owners of Alchemist and Meteor Lake GPUs can manually switch to it using specific kernel module parameters. It’s important to note that the user-space drivers, ANV for Vulkan and Iris for OpenGL via Gallium3D, remain the same regardless of which kernel driver is active.
This fresh round of testing was conducted to see how the driver landscape has evolved. The previous comparison was some time ago, making this new data on Linux 6.19 particularly relevant. The evaluation used the latest development builds to ensure the most current code was assessed.
A notable complication arose during the testing phase. The initial plan included benchmarking the Arc A750 and A770 models alongside the A580. However, both of those higher-end cards encountered a serious issue on the Linux 6.19 Git kernel at the time of testing. Neither card would initialize a display output, a problem confirmed by kernel logs retrieved from a remote system. Consequently, the performance comparison is confined to the Intel Arc A580, which functioned correctly with both the i915 and Xe drivers under this kernel version.
The results provide valuable insight for users deciding whether to make the switch to the newer driver stack on supported hardware.
(Source: Phoronix)
