Intel Xe vs. i915 Driver Performance On Linux 6.19 For Arc Alchemist GPUs

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 28 December 2025 at 11:10 AM EST. Page 4 of 5. 20 Comments.
vkpeak benchmark with settings of fp32-scalar. i915 Driver was the fastest.
vkpeak benchmark with settings of fp16-vec4. i915 Driver was the fastest.
vkpeak benchmark with settings of fp16-matrix. i915 Driver was the fastest.
vkpeak benchmark with settings of int16-scalar. Xe Driver was the fastest.
vkpeak benchmark with settings of int16-vec4. Xe Driver was the fastest.
vkpeak benchmark with settings of int8-dotprod. Xe Driver was the fastest.
vkpeak benchmark with settings of int8-matrix. i915 Driver was the fastest.
vkpeak benchmark with settings of bf16-dotprod. Xe Driver was the fastest.

When testing the Vulkan peak performance for different data types changing out the Intel kernel graphics driver had minimal impact on those results.

Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Llama-3.1-Tulu-3-8B-Q8_0, Test: Text Generation 128. i915 Driver was the fastest.
Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: granite-3.0-3b-a800m-instruct-Q8_0, Test: Text Generation 128. Xe Driver was the fastest.
Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3-Q8_0, Test: Text Generation 128. i915 Driver was the fastest.
Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B-Q8_0, Test: Text Generation 128. i915 Driver was the fastest.

The Llamapc.pp AI performance with its Vulkan back-end also saw no real performance difference on the Arc A580 from switching over to the Xe kernel driver.

ViennaCL benchmark with settings of Test: OpenCL BLAS, sCOPY. Xe Driver was the fastest.
ViennaCL benchmark with settings of Test: OpenCL BLAS, sAXPY. Xe Driver was the fastest.
ViennaCL benchmark with settings of Test: OpenCL BLAS, sDOT. Xe Driver was the fastest.

Interestingly with the ViennaCL OpenCL benchmarks on the Intel Compute Runtime, there was some big speed-ups observed when engaging the Xe kernel driver.

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