Sparse for the (two decade old) i915 driver is fine if you only need x86-64 support which would probably be most of us. Other architectures that could use the new Xe driver for DG2 (Alchemist) still wont have HUC (“for AVC/HEVC/VP9/AV1 low power encoding bitrate control, including CBR, VBR, etc encoding”) right? https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/xe/kernel/-/issues/234

Intel kinda backed itself into a smelly corner with its consumer GPU card debut. A year in and it’s still quite a mess.

I came for the pics and stayed for the story!

Arc won’t have proper game support until it’s using the Xe kernel mode driver (not until at least kernel 6.6) instead of i915. You can follow the progress of sparse rendering support for Xe here. Hardware AV1 encoding will not be supported with Xe, however.

If you want to stream your gaming (as long as it doesn’t require sparse rendering) and enjoy hardware AV1 encoding of the video you will have to disable Xe and revert to i915. You can choose one or the other.

There is a little hope for i915 to fake sparse rendering support (for games that don’t really use it, yet expect the feature flag). But you will still be stuck with last gen driver performance unless the optimizations are back-ported somehow.

As far as performance I found the A770 to fall quite far behind the AMD RX 6700XT for games (but no hardware AV1 encode for RX6700, the RDNA3 - RX7000 series can provide this). Who knows what the next gen Arc Battlemage will be like, but until the drivers mature I don’t think you will be unhappy with AMD.

This puts the concept of Disney employees in costumes as “cast members” in a rather diminished light.

Dough Rey

AMD seems to be eating their lunch in small computers for consumers with their APUs in the Steamdeck and the more than a half dozen like handhelds, mini-pcs, etc. I’m sure intel will hang onto small embedded devices for industrial applications for some time but it’s puzzling that they would just drop RISCV which seems poised to proliferate in this sector as well. It could just be that intel seeing that manufacture in China is and will continue to be very tricky has to narrow focus while they move their manufacture closer to home.

Arc won’t have proper game support until it’s using the Xe driver (not until at least kernel 6.5) instead of i915. You can follow the progress of sparse rendering support for Xe here. Hardware AV1 encoding will not be supported with Xe, however.

If you want to stream your gaming (as long as it doesn’t require sparse rendering) and enjoy hardware AV1 encoding of the video you will have to disable Xe and revert to i915. You can choose one or the other.

There is a little hope for i915 to fake sparse rendering support (for games that don’t really use it, yet expect the feature flag). But you will still be stuck with last gen driver performance unless the optimizations are back-ported somehow.

Populous Redux

I love Xubuntu LTS and have been using it since Ubuntu dropped Gnome 2. It’s light and stays out of my way.

Some things that make it really great are these PPAs:

• Oibaf (for the latest mesa graphics drivers) ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
  • Kisak’s Mesa PPA as an alternative is great too! ppa:kisak/kisak-mesa
• Mainline (for the latest kernels) ppa:cappelikan/ppa
• Xubuntu-dev staging for latest Xfce software ppa:xubuntu-dev/staging
• WineHQ staging (I rarely use wine directly anymore and just launch non Steam windows games in Steam (leveraging Proton) https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu

I’m a bit frustrated that Xubuntu is using snap for browsers so I use the Firefox tar: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_local-firefox-installation-in-users-account

Good old Sony MDR-7506 I found in e-waste, replaced the pads and they are golden (light and comfy over ear)! Before that I was using a modified David Clark H10 headset (heavy but naturally isolated with loads of insulation) with MDR-CD999 drivers (can’t believe these were a perfect fit) a Shure boom but it’s only for when the environmental noise is particularly hostile.