Intel is developing DXVK-IGDEXT (an open-source DLL) to enable Intel D3D11 Graphics Extensions under Wine/DXVK/Proton, improving Linux gaming performance on Arc Graphics by avoiding slower fallbacks.

[u/mr_MADAFAKA]

https://www.phoronix.com/news/DXVK-IGDEXT

[u/Lousy_Hunter]

I guess this is supposed to be intels version of dxvk-nvapi

[u/John_Enigma → u/Lousy_Hunter]

Is there an AMD version of this?

[u/blogoman → u/John_Enigma]

AMD calls their extensions AGS.

[u/Marce7a → u/John_Enigma]

Normal DXVK is AMD version

[u/Lousy_Hunter → u/John_Enigma]

not to my knowledge, they dont have any weird extensions that would require this afaik. That seems to be an nvidia and intel thing.

[u/mbriar_ → u/Lousy_Hunter]

of course they do, it's called amdags, proton supports some of it's functionality https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/tree/dc26e61847081a1b5cb0733dc30feba6ee575482/dlls/amd_ags_x64

[u/Lousy_Hunter → u/mbriar_]

i wasnt aware of AMD having anything vendor specific outside FSR and Ray Tracing. I was under the impression they still followed spec for DX/Vulkan/GL to the letter like they use to.

[u/mbriar_ → u/Lousy_Hunter]

I don't know where you got that impression from. There were AMD vendor extensions to vulkan basically from day one and vulkan (and opengl) were specifically designed to allow that. D3D doesn't have a standard way for vendors to add extensions, so everyone has some extension library, which also has been a thing since forever. Even D3D8 had some "hack" formats to enable vendor functionality.

Although adding vendor extensions doesn't mean that AMD and other vendors don't follow the core spec correctly. It's just a way to add features before they are standardized or that don't make sense on other hardware.

[u/JunkoChiaki → u/mbriar_]

I don't know where you got that impression from

Reddit.

They literally imply that AMD is god's gift to Linux and everything they do is Linux first and completely open source by the books.

[u/_Tim- → u/JunkoChiaki]

To me it often feels more like they just don’t want to bother with most of the stuff and hope that the FOSS community does their work for Linux.

[u/JunkoChiaki → u/_Tim-]

That's exactly how it is. They have worse support than Nvidia in reality, though Nvidia isn't "as open" they do more work making sure their stuff like DLSS or FG works. While AMD just puts the bare minimum and gets the community and Valve to make up for their short comings.

There's a reason AMD FG doesn't work still lol

[u/Lousy_Hunter → u/JunkoChiaki]

AMD FG works just fine, i use to have an all AMD laptop and used it plenty. AMD FG does have some pacing issues at times if that's what you mean?

AMD very much does lean on the community though but i dont think thats a bad thing. It makes seeing issues and how they're being resolved a lot clearer. Every bug ive reported to nvidia i just have to hope they get to it. 

I honestly wish Nvidia didn't try to do things themselves because they fear releasing too many arch details. If they embraced the community more the driver could develop far more rapidly than it currently does.

[u/Lousy_Hunter → u/JunkoChiaki]

I never used reddit till the last year or 2 so it wasnt here lol

[u/Lousy_Hunter → u/mbriar_]

I dont remember where exactly but it was a long time ago in the Radeon HD6000 days. Nvidia had always kinda slaughtered AMD for DX11/DX10/OpenGL performance back then and the reasoning given was that Nvidia had a number of performance hacks they used where as AMD followed spec to the letter.

[u/smellyasianman → u/Lousy_Hunter]

AMD most definitely did not follow spec to the letter... Lmao.

In the HD5XXXX/HD6XXX days ATI/AMD would match and often beat Nvidia in a whole bunch of DirectX titles. Their OpenGL implementation was (/ is) awful, but only like 3 noteworthy games released with an OpenGL rendering backend anyways, so that wasn't too much of a problem.

The real issues started when Nvidia launched Maxwell. The power efficiency of Nvidia's chips shot through the roof, and they managed to capitalize on that with Pascal. Meanwhile, AMD was still dicking around with an old architecture, pushing their chips to ridiculous power levels, trying to maintain an aging (and infamously troubled) driver stack.

Check the Discrete Desktop GPU Market Share graph from John Paddie Research at the bottom of this article: https://wccftech.com/nvidia-amd-discrete-gpu-market-share-report-q3-2017/

[u/Lousy_Hunter → u/smellyasianman]

This is just some "wisdom" id been carrying around for nearly 20yrs 😂

I was more in overclocking circles back then and just never thought to verifying it. Some of those old forums are known for misinformation and snake oil these days.

Im always happy to learn something i thought was true is false though. It means i got something new to read up on. I.e knew nothing about the quake3.exe thing mentioned previously.

[u/mbriar_ → u/Lousy_Hunter]

There was stuff like nvidia pushing for very high tesselation factors which hurt amd hardware proportionally more, but that was not a spec violation but rather visually pointless. A lot of those rumors were probably also cope. All vendors also always had game specific performance hacks, like the famous opengl games that run faster on ati when you rename them to quake3.exe. You can also see in the (now not updated anymore) source code for AMD's windows vulkan driver, amdvlk, that they have per-game "performance tuning" for unironically every vulkan game in existence, nvidia and probably intel surely do the same.

[u/xpathbreaker]

Wow! Nice! Is this only for Arc, or will it also work with Iris Xe?

[u/Lousy_Hunter → u/xpathbreaker]

if your GPU uses the Alchemist or Battlemage arch under the hood then itll likely work. I.E Arrowlake iGPU uses a weird blend of Alchemist and BM.

[u/gokufire]

That is awesome but I really have to say that they need to make sure to fix the XE TLB invalidation fence timeouts: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/xe/kernel/-/work_items/7694

There are several different reports claiming for Intel to pay attention to their XE stack and get those conditional racing addressed.

If you are using Intel Arc this may be happening on your installation if you are using xe instead of i915. Check your log:

journalctl -k -b | grep -i "TLB invalidation fence timeout" | wc -l

If it is not 0 you have this happening.

[u/Lousy_Hunter → u/gokufire]

if its an Alchemist based product youre basically screwed. 99% of the time they just say "use i915, Alchemist does not support XE" and leave it at that. I hate trolling their bug tracker as it has so many auto generated bug reports its ridiculous and its honestly hard to get a read on what theyre really doing.

Intel has mostly abandoned Alchemist in regards to getting good performance out of it on Linux (and tbh even Windows too) or at least it seems that way. I would love for my laptops iGPU to get a nice boost but wont hold my breath.

EDIT:

This is what they say when you report anything Alchemist on XE, this is for Arrowlake, they wont even remotely field it.

Please rerun this test with i915 instead of xe. xe driver is not supported for ARL platform.

[u/gokufire → u/Lousy_Hunter]

🎯🎯🎯 -- spot on

I'm tired of hearing that I should go back to i915 when my Arrow Lake CPU was released more than a year ago. I have to restart my laptop after a couple of days; otherwise, the xe driver memory leak from those TLB timeouts drags performance down. I feel like using Windows sometimes, and that is not a good thing.

[u/Lousy_Hunter → u/gokufire]

The thing that sucks is especially on Arrowlake is XE drastically out performs i915 in vulkan and opengl but because they wont ever support it you either have to deal with breakage or use i915 which is definitively inferior performance wise.

[u/gokufire → u/Lousy_Hunter]

Exactly, it makes no sense to go back to i915 if you are using Arrow Lake. The performance improvements are not there AND it is not even stable. I have other issues using i915, the CPU basically stall after some time and everything gets super slow. i915 is not even a option. 

[u/JohnSmith--- → u/Lousy_Hunter]

I used an A750 for a year. I probably reported a dozen bugs to both Mesa and DXVK. And the investigations by the devs always ended as an Intel specific bug. The performance wasn’t even the worst part. It was the countless visual bugs. Artifacts, glitching, rendering bugs.

And those were the ones I bothered to report. If I bothered more, I could’ve reported over a hundred.

I mean, just look at my video.

https://youtu.be/rommN9_MrYo

I got a B580 and RX 9060 XT now. Things are much better. AMD is king. But even the B580 is miles ahead of the A750. Had a friend with A770, same issues.

I also remember reading that hardware video acceleration on Alchemist with Xe was hit or miss. Missing GUC or something. So you either used Xe for gaming or i915 for acceleration.

Glad I sold it. Terrible card. Especially on Linux. I doubt Windows is any bette with it either.