Intel Arc B580 Delivers Promising Linux GPU Compute Potential For Battlemage
Now that the initial Intel Arc B580 graphics card gaming review on Linux is out, for productivity-minded users you may be more curious about the GPU compute potential... Here are some initial OpenCL and Level Zero results for the Intel Arc B580 graphics card compared to the Intel Arc A-Series and the AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce competition under Linux.
As noted in the Intel Arc B580 Linux gaming review this morning, the Battlemage / Xe2 graphics support is all upstream and open-source. For graphics workloads you will need to be on Linux 6.12+ and Mesa 24.3+ while as with most new hardware on open-source drivers: the newer, the better for having all the latest features and performance optimizations.
The kernel requirements are the same for those interested in Intel Arc B-Series graphics for GPU compute workloads: Linux 6.12 stable at least or Linux 6.13 Git for the very latest support... My launch day benchmarks were all on Linux 6.13 Git. For the OpenCL and Level Zero user-mode driver support, my tests were done using the latest Intel Compute Runtime on GitHub: v24.45.31740.9 that was released last week and paired with the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) v2.1.12. The Intel Compute Runtime release doesn't explicitly mention Battlemage support, but it was working with the B580 but with some bugs persisting. I will be around with more Battlemage GPU compute benchmarks as the stack matures.
For this article I was benchmarking the Intel Arc Graphics hardware using this very latest Compute Runtime, the AMD Radeon RX 7000 series cards on the new ROCm 6.3 release, and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards on the R565 driver. The graphics cards for this GPU compute comparison included:
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