For those using Intel Arc A-Series graphics cards on Linux, the i915 kernel driver remains the default but switching over to the Xe driver can yield some incremental performance benefits. For OpenCL / GPU compute workloads especially, switching to the Xe kernel driver can be rather dramatic.
It’s been a few years since last running i915 vs. Xe driver benchmarks and has long been on my TODO list to re-visit the performance on the latest Linux kernels to see any benefits of switching drivers. The Intel Xe driver can work with Intel graphics hardware back to the Tigerlake Gen11 integrated graphics but is only used by default beginning with Intel Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics. Switching to the Xe driver just requires using the i915.force_probe=![PCI-ID] and xe.force_probe=[PCI-ID] of the PCI device ID of the graphics card you want to disable for the i915 driver and force probe on the Xe kernel driver.
Using the Linux 6.17 Git kernel and Mesa 25.3-devel as well as the latest Intel Compute Runtime, I recently ran some fresh benchmarks looking at the Intel Arc Graphics A770 performance out-of-the-box with the i915 driver and then repeating the tests when booting the same software stack with the Xe driver instead.
Besides performance benefits, the Intel Xe driver was designed from the ground-up for modern Intel graphics hardware and modern Linux kernel driver interfaces. The Xe driver supports better non-x86 architectures and all around is their focus moving forward for their open-source kernel graphics driver.
