My main desktop, that I use to game on, is approaching 5 years old. It's a System76 Thelio Mira, and has been starting to show its age. I recently upgraded the CPU to the best I could get, without swapping motherboard, AMD Ryzen 5 5600X. I upped the memory to 64 GB, and the last upgrade I could easily to is to replace my old NVidia GeForce RTX 2060.
I've been trolling for an Intel Arc B580, mainly for the bang-for-the-buck performance. They have been selling for a lot over MSRP, but that seems to be common for all. I finally was able to get one a Microcenter for $329, the cheapest I've seen in months.
I use PopOS! on my desktop, and have been waiting for at lest the Beta release of Cosmic to upgrade, so am currently running on 22.04 LTS.
Installing was very simple. I followed the few steps on Intel's website:
https://dgpu-docs.intel.com/driver/client/overview.html#ubuntu-22.04
I powered off, swapped GPUs, and booted up, and it booted right up successfully. I then purged all the NVidia software/drivers, and rebooted without issue. Nothing further was needed.
I don't play AAA games much. My son plays Minecraft, and Jurassic World Evolution. I had installed Witcher 3 as a test right before swapping the cards.
The only hiccup in Steam was I needed to disable the Shader Pre-caching, then re-enabled (to force it to re-do it on the new GPU). Everything is butter smooth, without any other consideration. The whole system runs cooler too. I then installed Tiny Glade, which is known for stressing GPUs. It runs very well.
I've read some games do weird things on this card, but I have yet to have any issues at all. So far I am extremely pleased. I even got OpenWebUI/Ollama running on this card (that's another post).
Anyways, not sure if anyone is interested, but figured someone may be on the fence with that oddball card.
To be honest I think most issues Intel Arc has under Linux just come down to the tiny user base. Intel provides solid Linux support, I'd say it's probably on par with AMD.
Proton and such will have more incompatibilities, as will Mesa. You can report issues with specific games in Valve's proton repository. Sometimes someone will have a workaround for you, and usually issues will be fixed eventually, especially if you're willing to test changes and provide feedback.
I'd say in the long run yes, but they tend to be slower at adding features compared to AMD (which tends to be where all of the experimental stuff happens first). Or rather that AMD cards are often the first target for Mesa developers, which includes the likes of Valve.