Intel's Open-Source Linux Graphics Driver Delivered Significant Improvements In 2025

The GPUScore: Breaking Limit benchmark showed significant improvements for the Vulkan ray-tracing performance over the past year with the Arc B580. But even with these gains, the Breaking Limit ray-tracing benchmark at 1440p was still less than a 30 FPS (or even 20 FPS) average with the Intel Arc Graphics B580.

With ray-tracing disabled, Breaking Limit was showing nice gains for the Vulkan API performance of both the Arc A580 and B580 on Linux.

The Unigine Superposition with OpenGL was showing some minor performance gains over the past year when using the newest open-source Linux Linux graphics driver stack.

Beyond the year-over-year performance improvements, the Intel Linux graphics driver is much more capable now for running modern games compared to a year ago. One of the biggest improvements that comes to mind is the October fix: Intel Lands Big Linux GPU Driver Fix: Fixing Rendering Issues & Game Hangs/Crashes. There are many more modern games now -- especially under Steam Play -- that will run nicely on Intel graphics albeit not applicable for comparing to December 2024 since they wouldn't even properly run there.

As shown last week in the Intel Compute Runtime comparison and now with these OpenGL and Vulkan graphics driver benchmarks, the Intel Arc Graphics performance continues definitely moving in the right direction with their open-source GPU driver stack.