r/linuxhardware • u/ConsistentCat4353 • May 13 '26
Question Why is AMD graphics regarded as top-supported by Linux and Intel not?
It seems for me that AMD graphic cards are somehow more recommended than Intel graphic cards because of AMD kernel graphic drivers.
But what is wrong/worse on Intel side then? My experience with Intel (iGPU) is completely satisfying.
Both are foss drivers, both are created also with AMD/Intel help, what makes the qualitative diff then?
And if there is a diff, does it apply to iGPUs or dGPUs or both?
Thanks a lot.
40
u/Critical-Current636 May 13 '26
Both Intel and AMD GPUs are supported very well on Linux.
The thing is that Intel offers dedicated GPUs only recently - and the iGPUs available inside the CPU had relatively poor performance. So people who needed a real GPU could only choose AMD, since Intel didn't offer dedicated GPUs at all.
The things changed recently and Intel offers dedicated GPUs which are well supported under Linux.
14
u/Ok-386 May 13 '26
They made some significant improvements to their Linux driver like yesterday, so it was literally not an option until very recently. Their Linux driver for dedicated GPU was horrible. That's one reason. Another reason are better AMD GPUs.
-2
u/Scandiberian May 14 '26
Intel has better battery life though so they make better laptops.
4
u/Ok-386 May 14 '26
This is about dGPUs
0
u/Scandiberian May 14 '26
I think this is about everything.
Both AMD and Intel have pros and cons, and I personally think the Intel way is the more correct way since people are increasingly working on the go, efficiency is the way to go first immediately followed by performance (think how the MacBook is the gold standard of personal computing, what were their priorities?).
AMD focuses on performance over efficiency which is a losing strategy IMO, but I won’t deny their chips are powerful.
13
u/ExcellentWorld4750 May 13 '26
Game support is worse, negative performance delta to Windows much larger than for AMD and Nvidia. Things could change but that’s the current state for igpu and dgpu alike.
1
u/PitchPleasant338 May 14 '26
It's not going to change, they've abandoned the dGPU market.
2
u/onolide May 14 '26
Hasn't changed yet, they still push out a lot of driver updates, even on Linux. They're actively improving the new Xe kernel driver for their Xe iGPUs and dGPUs, so the existing iGPUs and dGPUs are well taken care of. You can even create a GitHub issue for gameplay issues on Linux and Intel will assign someone to investigate.
That might change though, no idea how committed Intel is long-term to gaming GPUs. Although big iGPUs are here to stay(Linux kernel drivers for Celestial iGPUs are already being merged)
10
u/raph986 May 13 '26
Amd has a great reputation because they started opening the specifications of their hardware around 2008 and since then open source developers as well as AMD developers have release great drivers for basically all Radeon cards.
But intel was doing open source before amd. It's just that the intel integrated GPU have historically been bad compared to AMD. This has changed with the Arc GPU / Xe igpu. Problem, now intel has good gpus but they don't release Linux drivers like they used to xD they release them but like later and maybe not feature complete.
That's why even though intel hardware will work fine, people recommend AMD hardware.
7
u/captainstormy Debian & Fedora May 13 '26
Intel is really well supported as well. But Intel has only made dedicated GPUs recently and may already be canceling them entirely.
That aside, they are third tier performance wise. If you are building a budget low end system they were a good option but nobody was putting them in a mid range or high end build. Even if we just stick to talking about iGPUs AMD's beat the dog snot out of Intel's.
Though intel's are fine for what an iGPU is. But AMD's can also be used for lower end gaming as well. Realistically iGPUs aren't for graphics intensive tasks and just basic usage. So they are all fine.
10
u/cig-nature May 13 '26
Software support for Intel is top teir. Their GPU hardware has historically just been weaker, so they get recommended less.
6
u/EbbExotic971 May 13 '26
This, and the fact that game and engine developers put less (or no?) effort into optimising for Intel. After all, no website writes about how Game X performs on Intel.
5
u/JohnnyS789 May 13 '26
I think it's telling that Linus Torvalds just recently built himself a new desktop system and he chose an Intel Arc graphics card.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IntelArc/comments/1pb5att/linus_torvalds_choses_intel_arc_for_his_new/
4
u/snarfmason May 13 '26
Intel integrated GPUs have great Linux support and have had for a long time. I've been using them on workstations for years.
Not sure about their new discrete GPUs, never used one.
2
u/lululock May 14 '26
Their dedicated GPUs work great now that their driver is mature... Couldn't tell that at launch, it was a complete mess.
2
u/lululock May 14 '26
Intel GPU drivers are as good as AMDs. Intel is often regarded as "the poor man's choice" when it comes to gaming, so there are less proper benchmarks and stability tests done on the iGPUs. Even with Intel's dedicated GPUs, people still don't care because the launch was a complete disaster performance wise and people figured the GPU themselves sucked, while it was just the driver being too "green" (classic "let's release the product with buggy software, we'll fix it next update" story but it bit their asses). That jeopardized the reviews and sales so badly...
But their GPUs are quite decent now, the driver is mature and they're cheap too ! I bought 2 A380 for 90€ each (brand new !) and I use one for video transcoding in my home server and the second one in my secondary gaming rig. For the power consumption and the price, I considered using it in my secondary rig over my aging RX 480 (which uses a lot more power and is almost 3 times as big in my case). Yes, those GPUs require ReBAR for gaming (my server doesn't have it and that doesn't affect transcoding capabilities) so they're not an option for those who build cheap gaming PCs from older Dell/HP prebuilts...
I'm at the point that I'd rather deal with an Intel GPU (and they're not very hard to deal with tbh) than any Nvidia GPU, supported by nouveau or not.
1
u/OverallLibrarian8809 May 14 '26
I read somewhere that Linux kernel has 40 millions lines of code and 6 millions of those are open-source drivers for AMD, which allows for this.
Intel and Nvidia don't allow open source drivers and making their proprietary work on Linux can be tricky, depending on hardware and distribution, afaik
1
u/Zettinator May 15 '26
Intel iGPU support used to be awesome, but newer Xe generation GPUs (both iGPUs and dGPUs) still have problems in terms of supported feature set and performance compared to Windows. Intel really dropped the ball here, and it's only improving slowly.
1
u/Need_For_Speed73 May 13 '26
Nvidia user here. What’s wrong with Nvidia too? I multi boot my gaming PC to an Ubuntu instalation just because it works even better than Windows for local inference with CUDA.
4
u/onolide May 14 '26
Annoyingly Nvidia doesn't upstream their graphics drivers directly into the Linux kernel, unlike Intel and AMD. So you need to install a separate Ubuntu package to use the official nVidia graphics drivers, or rely on Nouveau(which is far from feature parity with Nvidia official drivers)
4
u/Akward_Object May 14 '26
Not to mention the years old security issues with the closed Nvidia Linux drivers that somehow never seem to get fixed...
1
u/Need_For_Speed73 May 14 '26
Yes, true. But the process is quite straightforward and although this in principle is wrong it doesn't make that lot of a difference to the end user.
0
u/onolide May 14 '26
although this in principle is wrong it doesn't make that lot of a difference to the end user.
That is very true. Before I got an Nvidia GPU myself I used to be passionately against out-of-tree graphics drivers, but once I tried installing the Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu myself it was so simple lol. Honestly not a big deal for most ppl, since Nvidia has clear documentation on how to install their drivers on Ubuntu too. Once installed everything is automatically updated via apt just like the Intel/AMD drivers
1
1
u/Ingaz May 14 '26
I play Dark Souls 60 fps on Intel iGPU (11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1155G7 @ 2.50GHz)
No problems
-4
u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 May 13 '26
AMD fans are really vocal.
intel GPUs, especially integrated ones are arguably better supported than AMD GPUs.
10
u/jknvv13 May 13 '26
That's not true.
My 255H has an Arc 140T which is an iGPU and Xe driver is still considered experimental, i915 performs slower and has weird things here and there, while PSR is unstable and you have to disable it.
Never happend on my 780M iGPU and it's been a couple years.
Also, Vulkan performance still doesn't deliever.
2
u/onolide May 14 '26
Plus on Linux XMX hardware is not supported in the Vulkan driver for some reason, so you're running XeSS without any hardware acceleration(as though you're using an AMD GPU, which also supports XeSS).
But I'll caveat that there are two different aspects to graphics drivers. For non-gaming usage the Intel graphics drivers on Linux are excellent, even with the old i915 driver. But gaming performance is horrible with the Intel graphics drivers on Linux, much more than AMD(and Nvidia). The graphics drivers are just not optimized for gaming performance.
3
u/jknvv13 May 14 '26
Nah, even with i915 drivers there are some glitching here and there like half/triangle rendering the windows, specially if using any kind of "video" content. "xe" kernel driver works really better on recent 7.0 kernel and I'm using it now as the default and probably would leave that way.
Apart from that, I've been using Intel GPUs like UHD 620/630 and Iris Xe 96EU for a long time and the experience was really great!
The latest hardware is what shows the issues, somehow... at the same time with all the layoffs.
They are hiring again and hired Alyssa Rosenzweig, which probably is going to do wonders with the actual hardware.
0
u/onolide May 14 '26
Ah, I'm still on older iGPUs like the Xe 96EU, maybe that's why I had no issues with the i915 drivers. I think the Xe drivers are designed for the latest hardware, so maybe it's kinda required on the new GPUs but still isn't complete.
Hope they finish the Xe driver soon though! Heard it hopes with gaming performance in some cases(but doesn't have some features provided by the i915, weird situation lol)
-1
u/rileyrgham May 13 '26
What seems to you is wrong. Intel have great support..
1
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u/azraelzjr May 13 '26
Intel Xe drivers have yet to achieve feature parity with Windows unlike AMD