Similar to AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs where there was product overlap between the Radeon and AMDGPU kernel drivers (and now using AMDGPU by default for those aging Radeon GPUs with Linux 6.19), the Intel Arc A-Series “Alchenist” graphics cards are in a similar boat. By default the Alchemist and Meteor Lake graphics use the i915 kernel driver by default but they can optionally use the Xe kernel driver instead as what is Intel’s modern open-source kernel graphics driver. As part of our various year end 2025 benchmarks, today is a look at the current i915 vs. Xe driver performance for the Intel Arc Graphics A580.
The Xe driver is Intel’s modern Linux kernel designed for their modern GPU architectures and with discrete GPUs in mind, better non-x86_64 support for Intel discrete graphics on say ARM64 and RISC-V, and various other design improvements over the decades old i915 driver. The Intel Xe kernel driver is only used by default beginning with Lunar Lake and Battlemage hardware but Alchemist and Meteor Lake can enjoy optionally switching over to the newer driver using the “i915.force_probe=![PCI-ID] and xe.force_probe=[PCI-ID]” kernel module options. The same ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D Mesa drivers are used regardless of the Direct Rendering Manager kernel driver.
A while ago we last looked at the Xe vs. i915 kernel driver performance so as part of my various end-of-year 2025 benchmarks is a fresh look at the difference using the Linux 6.19 Git kernel. Mesa 26.0-devel also provided the latest ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D drivers. Testing both kernel drivers on Linux 6.19 was done using the Intel Arc Graphics A580.
Originally I intended to also include the Arc A750 and Arc A770 graphics cards too, but both of those were currently broken on the Linux 6.19 Git kernel as of testing time:
No display would light up with either the A750 or A770 and the kernel logs captured on a remote system. The Intel Arc Graphics A580 was at least working fine on both drivers with Linux 6.19.
