How do you not know that Intel has they same type of open source graphics driver like AMD? Their kernel module, OpenGL and Vulkan libraries are all free software, only requiring small firmware blobs. That's why Intel 'just werks' on Linux without having to download a 500mb kernel module or have a separate .iso available to download specific to the hardware.

At an absolute minimum! When Arc first came out I considered getting one just for the AV1 encoder, but there's very little else going for the whole line. An open-source driver at least makes the techier among us more likely to want to play with one.

I mean so long as it's a decent enough card, people will buy it. The arc cards we already got have some pretty solid price/performance, at least after the drivers got improved.

I'd like to say they can only get better than the current generation, but it is Intel we're talking about.

Were they though? After they fixed the drivers and used proper transition layers for directX they're really decent entry-level cards.

Uh they weren't garbage, there was some crappy drivers early on, but that's mostly been fixed now. They're no 4090Ti Ultra Premium Super Whatever, but on cost to performance in the entry level segment they're solid performers

The Arc cards are the most price efficient graphics cards now, that's hardly garbage.

The cheap arc are great, no amazing, for homeservers and transcoding.

Its performance and driver situation might not be as great as AMD and Nvidia at the moment, but at least it works. At the very least still miles ahead of Moore Threads GPUs, which released around the same time.

The games that have drivers make it a kick ass card. It's just a question of if every game you play has those drivers.

Latest batch of drivers has them competing against the mid-range current-gen cards. They're putting in the work to really start throwing punches.