A bit of a double-whammy this week from Intel. Not only did they announce that CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired, but they've also now properly revealed their new Arc B-Series GPUs.
News of Gelsinger's retirement was shared by Intel on December 2nd. Intel has named two senior staffers, David Zinsner and Michelle (MJ) Johnston Holthaus, as interim co-chief executive officers while they search for a new permanent CEO.
Gelsinger said, “Leading Intel has been the honor of my lifetime – this group of people is among the best and the brightest in the business, and I’m honored to call each and every one a colleague. Today is, of course, bittersweet as this company has been my life for the bulk of my working career. I can look back with pride at all that we have accomplished together. It has been a challenging year for all of us as we have made tough but necessary decisions to position Intel for the current market dynamics. I am forever grateful for the many colleagues around the world who I have worked with as part of the Intel family.”
As for the new Intel Arc B-Series graphics cards (code-named Battlemage), only two models have been currently announced with the Arc B580 and B570 GPUs. The B580 will get a Limited Edition model and various partner releases from the likes of Acer, ASRock and others starting December 13 from $249. While the B570 will arrive January 16th starting $219.
Intel said "Compared with the previous generation, the Intel Arc B-Series GPUs offer 70% better performance per Xe-core and 50% more performance per watt. The B580 GPU, when compared to the Intel Arc A750 GPU, is on average 24% faster at 1440p with some games up to 78% faster. When compared to the competition, the Intel Arc B580 GPU offers up to 32% better performance-per-dollar".
This comes along with an announcement of XeSS 2 which now includes three different bits of tech including XeSS Super Resolution, AI-powered XeSS Frame Generation and Xe Low Latency. So they're following in the footsteps of AMD and NVIDIA here.
Going by their press slides games supporting XeSS 2 will including Assassin's Creed Shadows, Harry Potter Quidditch Champions, Robocop Rogue City, Like a Dragon Pirate Yakuza, Dying Light 2, F1 24, Ascendant, Marvel Rivals, Killing Floor 3 and Citadels.
See their explainer announcement video below:
Direct Link
Be sure to leave a comment on your thoughts. Will you be buying either of the new GPUs?
Hopefully they will work well on Linux. It's likely you'll need a very up to date kernel and Mesa version for them.
I'm still not getting Intel press releases, so have reached out again today to see why.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Last edited by pilk on 3 December 2024 at 8:40 pm UTC
TimeFreeze Dec 3
Avehicle7887 Dec 3
It always seemed to me that the actual hardware is not half bad but the drivers are a different story.
Still loving my RX 6800, it continues to serve me well. Next upgrade will most likely be the new AMD card.
These new cards can barely compete with previous generation Nvidia/AMD cards, have nothing on current gen and are dead in the water against the upcoming releases from both competitors in Q1 2025. RIP.
Been a while since I followed intel gpu's, are the Arc series still a mess on Linux?
It always seemed to me that the actual hardware is not half bad but the drivers are a different story.
Still loving my RX 6800, it continues to serve me well. Next upgrade will most likely be the new AMD card.
This is me as well. I will wait for some reviews to come out on the various sites comparing these new cards to the amd 6xxx and 7xxx lines. I'm also currently on a 6800xt and waiting for the 8xxx series to come out before building an entirely new system. Looking forward to the release!
Speaking of these cards, I also do really hope they can enjoy some form of success so competition is just a little better for us consumers. AMD not competing against nvidia at the top end is just so so so bad.
chickenb00 Dec 3
TechPowerUp ran a DLSS/FSR/XESS comparison in Stalker 2 and found that XESS outperforms FSR3 visually, so they're already ahead of the game in that one title anyway.
CyborgZeta Dec 4
My Intel Arc A770 that I've been using for over a year generally works very well. But there is the occasional Steam game that won't launch, or just crashes. I had to play P3: Reload in its entirety on my Steam Deck because it would crash on my A770 after the opening video.
If the B580 allows to play P3R on my desktop, then I would consider it to be an improvement. Having 12GB of VRAM would be nice too, since my A770 is an 8GB model.
Arehandoro Dec 4
A $250 GPU with that kinda stuff is compelling. If it's a meaningful upgrade from my 2080, I might make a bad financial decision.By Intel's own graphics it will probably perform much like a RX 7600 XT so it's not really much of an upgrade for someone that already has a RTX 2080 or similar card.
XeSS on Linux was/is lagging behind Windows considerably when it comes to features and bug solving. And there is also the fact that XeSS 1.0 wasn't opensource at first release and wrongly being advertised as opensource.
Mesa drivers are "ok" but are unable to extract all performance the hardware has. I would not trust Intel for GPUs, and I would even buy a NVIDIA instead of getting an Intel.
To correctly advertise XeSS on Wine through mesa, some weird hacks need to be implemented so the game does not crash while being advertised as a cross-vendor fallback.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/23271
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/25965
Not to count here the many fixes made to multiple games like Hitman 3, Hogwarts legacy and The Finals that had to hide the vendor ID to avoid crashes
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/27477
And just to make myself clear here: I'm not in any degree bashing Mesa here. Those folks are doing whatever is needed and doing beyond support scope to circumvent every difficulty that is imposed by Intel.
Last edited by nwildner on 5 December 2024 at 9:58 am UTC
"Retired" is the PR spin; the board forced him out. It's also been said these are likely the last discrete GPUs, as Intel is looking to cut costs, and it will take a lot more investment for them to actually compete.I might be wrong but didn't Intel lay off some people recently in the Battlemage and GPU division?
A $250 GPU with that kinda stuff is compelling. If it's a meaningful upgrade from my 2080, I might make a bad financial decision.
This! I have an 1070 and while it's holding up, a cheap upgrade to keep playing for the need 5 years would be super nice!
And just to make myself clear here: I'm not in any degree bashing Mesa here. Those folks are doing whatever is needed and doing beyond support scope to circumvent every difficulty that is imposed by Intel."Those folks" (which develop the Intel drivers) are employees of Intel. There's no bashing Intel without bashing Mesa.
"Those folks" (which develop the Intel drivers) are employees of Intel. There's no bashing Intel without bashing Mesa.
Yes there are employees in some of the contributions, and they might have signed up a NDA that restricts how, when and what they can contribute to multiple projects, which leads them to implement those changes on Mesa to keep the games running without being allowed to contribute to the drivers without further approval of their managers, or contribution on a limited scope.
You are reversing roles here and trying to use a sophism to justify that Intel Employees having their actions limited by their company is enough to bash Mesa Project as a consequence, as if Mesa is the one to blame for Intel company bad decisions in their driver development model.
Also, assuming Mesa is purely maintained by Intel is also a really bad point of view - https://www.mesa3d.org/developers/
Last edited by nwildner on 6 December 2024 at 12:49 pm UTC
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