It has now been a week since the release of the Intel Arc B580, a budget gaming CPU that Team Blue proclaimed “wins in value” against its close competitors the RTX 4060 and RX 7600. That statement seems to ring true for the most part, as the card was highly praised by earlier reviewers, one calling it “a budget card that doesn’t suck for once“.
As expected, pretty much any initial benchmarks you could find of the GPU were done in Windows, the de facto operating system for PC gaming. Gaming results for Linux on the other hand are harder to come by. Thankfully, a quick five-game benchmark now gives us a closer look at Battlemage on Linux; Alchemist didn’t fare too well at launch, but this gen is already more promising.
Intel Arc B580 and RX 7600 XT gaming benchmarks for Linux
Overall, Windows remains the most popular OS for PC gamers and will likely stay that way for some time. Linux-based development via the likes of SteamOS (the Steam Deck’s operating system) is a promising sign if you want to stop gaming on Windows, but support for Linux can still be fairly patchy. In any case, devices like the Steam Deck have incentivized developers to allocate some focus to Linux optimization, which is great news moving forward.
New benchmarks posted by German site ComputerBase provide us with a close look into Linux gaming benchmarks. Their system ran on Ubuntu 24.10 and featured the Ryzen 7 8600G, an MSI B650 motherboard, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and tested at 1080p. The specific cards used were the ASrock Arc B580 Steel Legend (12GB) and Acer Nitro Radeon RX 7600 XT OC (16GB).
| Control (DX11) | Cyberpunk 2077 | Ghost of Tsushima | Hogwarts Legacy | Silent Hill 2 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RX 7600 XT average FPS | 84.2 | 110.6 | 99.6 | 105.8 | 71.6 |
| Arc B580 average FPS | 67.1 | 61.2 | 58.6 | 86.1 | 59.3 |
| RX 7600 XT 1% lows | 59.4 | 52.3 | 68.9 | 59.9 | 54.8 |
| Arc B580 1% lows | 58.4 | 46.5 | 42.0 | 59.7 | 33.3 |
Vulkan is often the preferred choice of graphics API for Linux users. This is also the case on the Steam Deck, and thankfully more modern games support it. One title to be tested (Control) was limited to DirectX 11, though the B580 still managed over 60 frames on average and wasn’t miles behind the 7600 XT. Across the board, the 7600 XT enjoyed a higher frame rate and showed better performance on Linux, so there is still some work to be done from Intel in terms of driver support. One thing that did
For comparison, Techpowerup also tested ASRock’s Steel Legend card and it performed slightly better than the RX 7600 XT on average at 1080p – 82.9 FPS versus 78.9 FPS, respectively, when benchmarked on Windows 11 24H2. So, it goes to show that Linux support on Battlemage isn’t quite there yet – but it is a notable improvement over the last-gen Alchemist launch which was causing many problems such as crashes with XeSS or games failing to boot at all.
And if you’re thinking about Nvidia, their closed-source drivers have historically been problematic for gaming on Linux. However, it announced more support for Linux earlier this year, so Team Green is becoming a more viable option for gaming. Users report positive performance with some of Nvidia’s latest GPUs.
