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Switching From i915 To Xe Linux Drivers Can Yield Some Big Gains For Intel Arc A-Series
For those using Intel Arc A-Series graphics cards on Linux, the i915 kernel driver remains the default but switching over to the Xe driver can yield some incremental performance benefits.
For OpenCL / GPU compute workloads especially, switching to the Xe kernel driver can be rather dramatic. Using the Linux 6.17 Git kernel and Mesa 25.3-devel as well as the latest Intel Compute Runtime, I recently ran some fresh benchmarks looking at the Intel Arc Graphics A770 performance out-of-the-box with the i915 driver and then repeating the tests when booting the same software stack with the Xe driver instead. Besides performance benefits, the Intel Xe driver was designed from the ground-up for modern Intel graphics hardware and modern Linux kernel driver interfaces.
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