Last week with the availability of the Intel Arc B-Series Battlemage graphics cards I ran benchmarks looking at the GPU compute performance, Linux gaming benchmarks, and also the workstation graphics capabilities. The Intel Arc B580 graphics showed some nice generational uplift under Linux for most workloads but there were some anomalies where clearly the Intel Linux graphics driver had room to better optimize the new Xe2/Battlemage graphics support. Windows benchmarks of the Intel Arc B580 also showed it performing more competitively to the likes of the GeForce RTX 4060 compared to what I was seeing under Linux. Thus I spent the past few days working on some Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux graphics benchmarks for both Intel Arc Graphics of Alchemist and Battlemage GPUs to see how the performance compares.
Today’s article is looking at the Intel Arc A580, Arc A770, and Arc B580 graphics on the same Intel Arrow Lake system when tested under Microsoft Windows 11 and repeating with the same benchmarks under Ubuntu 24.10 and using the very latest Intel open-source graphics driver code. The Intel Core Ultra 9 285K on the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z890 HERO motherboard was used for all of the testing with 32GB of RAM and carrying out clean installs of both Microsoft Windows 11 Pro and Ubuntu 24.10 to a WD_BLACK SN850X NVMe SSD 1TB.
Clean installs of both operating systems took place to the same hardware and the only modifications to each OS being to install the very latest graphics drivers. The newest Intel Arc Graphics Windows drivers were installed as of this past weekend (14 December) and then similarly the very latest upstream open-source Intel Linux graphics support as of 15 December with Linux 6.13 Git and Mesa 25.0-devel (via the Oibaf PPA) for this leading-edge look at Intel Arc Graphics for Windows vs. Linux performance. All other operating systems on both Windows and Ubuntu Linux were kept at their respective defaults including the likes of the platform profiles, governor, and other OS defaults for each platform.
A variety of graphics and GPU compute benchmarks were run for games that also work well on Linux natively or via Steam Play as well as various OpenGL / Vulkan benchmarks with really focusing upon the graphics driver comparison performance as opposed to wanting to evaluate the OS/emulation overhead and the like. Plus workloads like Blender with oneAPI. The focus of this article isn’t trying to go after some AAA gaming comparison but rather looking at the strengths and weaknesses of the Intel Linux graphics driver for the new Battlemage hardware relative to Windows at large.
