Intel graphics support request in LACT

[Citizen839X]

Hi everyone,

I officially advance a simple request to take in serious consideration the Intel ARC support in LACT, since they are improving a lot through the MESA open source drivers under Linux distributions. They are also fully configurable with the oneAPI feature under Blender LTS software. Unfortunately, Intel itself doesn't have any intention to support Linux with an official control panel (at least for this year) and that's a pity, these cards have great potential and better competitive prices in the actual market, especially in Europe.

Even in gaming (actually with MESA 24.1.7-391-1) their antialiasing and shaders performances are better than AMD cards. Considering now the ARC 580 instead of an AMD 6650XT especially for Linux users, it's a cost/performance bargain.

Regards,
Citizen

[ilya-zlobintsev]

I am not against adding support for Arc GPUs. Now that there is also support for Nvidia the code architecture allows for it. However I do not have any access to Arc hardware to test on, so any potential implementation would be based solely off documentation and test reports from users.

I've actually looked into Arc support previously, and at the time there seemed to be no way to do any configuration under Linux. Could you be more specific about fully configurable with the oneAPI feature under Blender LTS software? What settings does it expose, is there any documentation about it or example scripts? I haven't found anything that's clearly applicable to Arc with a quick search, but I also haven't looked at intel's documentation in detail.

It's also worth noting that for now the popularity and overall viability of Intel dGPUs is still quite low, and it's uncertain if they will exist beyond Alchemyst and maybe Battlemage. Because of this I don't want to spend too much effort on this if support for it ends up being too problematic or doesn't fit well into LACT. But again, I'm not opposed to it if it's reasonable to implement.

[Citizen839X]

That's ok, understandable.

Now, ARC cards are simply fully supported via oneAPI in Blender 4.2 LTS once you install all the necessary dependencies (I can speak for openSUSE which is the distro I use) even though the ray tracing isn't great but at least with no strange artifacts or crashes. I'm confident that things will improve soon and Intel ARC will gain respect.

Keep up the great work, LACT is a very interesting and promising utility ;)

[ilya-zlobintsev]

I did some more searching and there doesn't seem to be any way to do things like clocks configuration or custom power limits on Linux with Arc. The closest thing is xpumanager, which only works for Intel data center GPUs and not Arc.

[ilya-zlobintsev]

UPDATE: after digging through kernel code, it appears that it is actually possible to configure intel graphics on Linux. However, it needs the xe kernel driver to be used. Starting with Battlemage it is the default, all previous platforms use i915 instead, but it is possible to force the xe driver to be used on graphics starting with Rocket Lake (including Alchemyst).

I got the driver working on a laptop iGPU, and it does expose frequency controls, and I'll try to see what I can get working. However I cannot do full testing as I do not have access to any Intel dGPU (Battlemage or Alchemyst).

[Citizen839X]

Hi Ilya,
this is great news! Looks promising and I think from a quiet long time that the i915 is the key factor to have decent readings through useful stuff like nvtop terminal and, by consequence, all the apps like yours. Thank you also for have changed the title, it makes more sense also because the ARC line is advancing despite the poor distribution in Europe. Let's hope Intel will improve.

If you have a decent desktop machine with a mobo that support the resize bar I can give you an ASRock Challenger A380 6GB GDDR6 for testing. It requires one additional power connector (8 pin) and it has been used for just 8 months on my Asus Prime B550-M CSM then I switched to something more capable and well balanced like the Sparkle A580 8Gb GDDR6.
I'm glad to help as I could for the right cause, let me know, hit me a message in private.

Cheers,
C.

[ilya-zlobintsev]

Thanks for the offer, this would be very helpful. Do you have a private contact channel where we could arrange this?

[Citizen839X]

Yes, send me message at [email protected]