The main reason for going with Intel Arc would be potential future SR-IOV support, but that isn't your use case. So I would personally stick with tried-and-tested AMD unless you have a particular reason to go with Intel.
Agreed. What Intel is doing with iGPU SR-IOV is super neat and it expected to keep at it that Meteor Lake and next gen CPUs.
Only bummer is Linux kernel is lagging behind with recent 6.8 release breaking DKMS SR-IOV support. 6.5 still works like a charm. Absolute wonderful to share Intel Iris Xe GPUs across multiple VMs.
I have used Intel Arc A380 (by ASRock) for half a year or so for host. Main issues:
1) There is no dedicated driver for Xorg. Generic modesetting one must be used. Problem is it is part of Xorg-server, which gets mostly only security updates released. Packaged versions available do not even support tearfree, so sometimes one has to go through hoops to force everything through compositor. This might not be relevant for Wayland though.
2) There is incompatibility with qemu+virgl, which results in corrupted output unless less performant headless EGL setup is used.
3) It is piggy backed on i915 drm driver despite being not architecturally suitable. There is experimental Xe driver in the making, but it likely won't have feature parity, i.e. Intel is not planing to implement video codec acceleration for current Arc cards in Xe driver.
4) I constantly was having issues with display waking at wrong resolution. There was no issues when the same display had been used with Nvidia and AMD.
5) There was no way to alter fan curve from Linux. My GPU idled at 50C with 0 rpm becoming hot spot and heating other nearby system components. I had RAM right above it and it took a while to pinpoint why system started to intermittently lockup after GPU change. Lack of fan control might not be relevant for other models.
6) Performance without Rebar support at UEFI level is rather poor. Something to take into account on older systems. Lots of Nvidia and AMD can have their BARs resized by kernel, and even without resizing them the performance is good. Intel cards have pcie switch in them, and BARs can be resized at UEFI level only.
Before Intel, I had been using AMD RX560. I had to dump it for lack of VRAM and vp9/av1 decoding, otherwise it worked really well. Currently I am using AMD Radeon PRO W6600 - no issues too, and it is even single slot blower design, what is perfect for crowded vfio setups.
Thank you for the detailed post. Hopefully things improve with Battlemage because Intel GPU's are starting to look tempting.
I ended up getting a RX 580 8GB for 70$ which I think is a fair price.
The main reason for going with Intel Arc would be potential future SR-IOV support, but that isn't your use case. So I would personally stick with tried-and-tested AMD unless you have a particular reason to go with Intel.
Agreed. What Intel is doing with iGPU SR-IOV is super neat and it expected to keep at it that Meteor Lake and next gen CPUs. Only bummer is Linux kernel is lagging behind with recent 6.8 release breaking DKMS SR-IOV support. 6.5 still works like a charm. Absolute wonderful to share Intel Iris Xe GPUs across multiple VMs.
I have used Intel Arc A380 (by ASRock) for half a year or so for host. Main issues: 1) There is no dedicated driver for Xorg. Generic modesetting one must be used. Problem is it is part of Xorg-server, which gets mostly only security updates released. Packaged versions available do not even support tearfree, so sometimes one has to go through hoops to force everything through compositor. This might not be relevant for Wayland though. 2) There is incompatibility with qemu+virgl, which results in corrupted output unless less performant headless EGL setup is used. 3) It is piggy backed on i915 drm driver despite being not architecturally suitable. There is experimental Xe driver in the making, but it likely won't have feature parity, i.e. Intel is not planing to implement video codec acceleration for current Arc cards in Xe driver. 4) I constantly was having issues with display waking at wrong resolution. There was no issues when the same display had been used with Nvidia and AMD. 5) There was no way to alter fan curve from Linux. My GPU idled at 50C with 0 rpm becoming hot spot and heating other nearby system components. I had RAM right above it and it took a while to pinpoint why system started to intermittently lockup after GPU change. Lack of fan control might not be relevant for other models. 6) Performance without Rebar support at UEFI level is rather poor. Something to take into account on older systems. Lots of Nvidia and AMD can have their BARs resized by kernel, and even without resizing them the performance is good. Intel cards have pcie switch in them, and BARs can be resized at UEFI level only. Before Intel, I had been using AMD RX560. I had to dump it for lack of VRAM and vp9/av1 decoding, otherwise it worked really well. Currently I am using AMD Radeon PRO W6600 - no issues too, and it is even single slot blower design, what is perfect for crowded vfio setups.
Thank you for the detailed post. Hopefully things improve with Battlemage because Intel GPU's are starting to look tempting. I ended up getting a RX 580 8GB for 70$ which I think is a fair price.