Last week I provided a look at how Intel’s GPU compute performance on Battlemage evolved in 2025. In today’s article is a similar Intel Arc A-Series “Alchemist” and B-Series “Battlemage” look at how the OpenGL and Vulkan graphics performance has evolved over the past year. Simply put, the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack has evolved immensely this year… Not just for Vulkan but even the OpenGL support continues moving in the right direction too.
Last week’s comparison was about the Intel Arc B580 GPU compute performance now versus the performance when it launched last December. Plus similar December 2024 vs. November 2025 comparisons on the Intel Arc A580 too for seeing how much of the software driver optimizations are specific to Battlemage or also benefiting prior-generation Alchemist GPUs. Today’s article is a similar one-year look both for the Intel Arc A580 and Arc B580 graphics but instead focused on the Iris Gallium3D OpenGL and ANV Vulkan driver performance (and associated kernel updates, etc) over the past year.
The same Intel Core Ultra 9 285K desktop system was used back in December and then for these fresh benchmarks with the Core Ultra 9 285K Arrow Lake at stock speeds, ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z890 HERO motherboard, and 2 x 16GB DDR5-6400 memory.
Last December for the Arc B580 launch the testing was done on Ubuntu 24.10 with the Linux 6.13-rc1 kernel and Mesa 25.0-devel state. Now for the fresh benchmarks was Ubuntu 25.10 atop a Linux 6.18 Git kernel and also using Mesa 26.0-devel from the Mesa ACO PPA plus all of the other software updates over the past year incorporated into Ubuntu 25.10.
From there a variety of OpenGL and Vulkan workloads were tested for seeing the impact on the graphics performance of the A580 and B580 over 2025 with these open-source Linux software updates.
