Between the the best available Intel and AMD CPUs, which of the two is more likely to give me better gaming performance? I’m on Bazzite with gaming mode enabled.
Intel likely to give you better peak performance as the iGPU is much better performance wise.
HOWEVER
Linux support for the Arc B390 is acceptable at best, so far I’ve encountered the following testing the X7 mainboard:
- Panel Self Refresh (PSR) cannot be enabled together with VRR, otherwise full screen applications see a black screen upon focusing.
- No PSR = 30% less battery life, no VRR = stuttery games when sub 60 fps
- Crashing games with no fix. (And I tried everything.) This includes all fromsoft games and some more.
- No usable XESS. The XMX cores are not accessible under Linux and enabling XESS without that usually incurs a performance penalty worse than not enabling upscaling.
- FSR visual quality is horrible compared to XESS under windows/DLSS.
- With a niche display ratio (3:2) and high res screen you will want to enable upscaling. Which circles back to the point above
- Manual core pinning of every game is very much required to balance CPU/GPU power budgets toward each game’s unique workload profile. This also means feral game mode is not going to be useful.
Note that my kernel, intel-graphics and Mesa are all latest, so it’s not a problem of “not using bleeding edge driver”, etc.
I’d say if you want to “just play games”, “right now”, “with 100% optimal utilization of the hardware” then either buy AMD or buy intel but run Windows.
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Just a plain comparison of the chips. But as said, there may be differences for your setup, and maybe the chips don’t behave the same in the PW13P
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This is Windows. I tried Linux in its current state and it’s very much incomplete 
But then when I switch back to windows on an external SSD and run BF6, it is amazing and doesn’t feel like an iGPU at all 
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I really hope the drivers will be fixed soon to be on par with Windows… (Waiting for my Pro in batch 14 with Intel-Chip, which will run CachyOS) 
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I wish the crashes/freezes in certain games would be fixed. No hope for XeSS though. Without XeSS it really feels like a 30% performance penalty vs Windows.
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Hmmm, I have no intention of going back to Windows, and I think I rather take a slight performance hit (unless the performance difference isn’t negligible?) than deal with troubleshooting, especially since I’d still consider myself a linux noob. So I’m leaning slightly towards AMD right now, but I’m open to more input. Thank you!
This is really quite disappointing to read… thanks for sharing.
However, I guess I should bear in mind that life on the bleeding edge is always going to be painful for linux users until we are enough to tip the market into a “linux first” or at least “linux at the same time as…” mindset.
It took a good 6-8 months before my RX 9070XT really worked well enough under linux to fulfill a lot of it’s marketing promise (gaming was mostly fine, but local AI use was laughable at first) and now 12 months in, it’s fine.
So, we just have to wait for Intel to to realise that their plans of gaming handhelds will probably perform better, be cheaper for the consumer and therefore sell better running something like SteamOS … so they need to hurry up with XESS on linux. Hopefully the recent hints that Valve is working on official Intel card support for SteamOS will push this along.
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My 2 cents:
My rule of thumb: when using Linux, only use hardware that is 12 months or more old since its release. Then, most of the time you are fine when it comes to compatibility and performance.
I had to learn that the hard way again with my Radeon 7900 XT that I bought way too early after release.
When using a rolling release distro, you will be hit by regressions; that is something you cannot avoid, and it is the nature of the Linux dev flow.
When it comes to gaming, the amdgpu is way better compared to the Intel side (performance and compatibility).
As someone that bought it very early, things weren’t pretty on windows either XD