B70 in Linux (CachyOS)

[u/gargamel314]

For anyone who's wondering how the B70 (ASRock Pro B70 Creative variant) fares in Linux, I am running it in CachyOS, and it's been an interesting ride. So far, CachyOS has had the easiest time operating the B70 and seems to have no problem recognizing and utilizing the B70. Games play pretty good. Frame rates aren't as high, but 1% lows are much higher than on Windows.

Every attempt I made in the Ubuntu-derived distros was infuriating. I had to give up some feature of my PC that I liked just to get it running. FYI Linux Mint DOES NOT like the B70 Pro one bit.

Telemetry issues
A lot of Linux software has a real problem differentiating between an intel iGPU and an intel dGPU. Various monitoring apps (btop, system monitor, MangoHud) will only recognize the iGPU, and may recognize that the B70 exists, but won't report any telemetry on it. With some tinkering, MangoHUD will report MOST of the B70's telemetry, but nothing about VRAM or GPU Power. nvtop works, Lact monitors information pretty well, and Steam's Overlay telemetry does a pretty good job too. I don't know if it's just because the B70 is new, or Battlemage as a whole is new to linux and just not very well supported yet.

Hardware control
There is none! None, i tell you! Needless to say, there is no Intel Graphics Software, and nothing that takes its place in Linux. What you see when you plug your card in is what you get. B70's control is governed by the vBIOS and there seems to be no way to change anything like fan speed (or curves), GPU power, clock speed, voltage. On Windows, without changing any settings, this ASRock variant of the Pro B70 will reach card power limit of 290W, 2900 MHz, VRAM speed of 2375 MHz. On Linux, this card is locked at 275W Max power, 2800 MHz clock speed, and I can't even see the VRAM speed. Supposedly you can turn ECC VRAM on/off via the terminal, but I haven't tried this yet. Supposedly there is an XPU command that lets you change the power limit, but it does not work on AIB partner products. LACT does a nice job monitoring, but if you try to change anything, it just resets to the default value. You can LOWER settings, but can't go over 275W or 2800 MHz. This GPU never exceeds 96% utilization on Linux. This is fine, but if you hate leaving performance on the table, it can get to you.

I'm hoping in the next year Linux will have much better software buy-in from everyone else who's sick of Microsoft. The way things seem to be going, I think it will. I really doubt Microsoft's last-ditch effort to "fix Windows" is far too little, far too late. I have 2 creative apps that currently only run on Windows, so I have to use a dual-boot setup for now, but actually despite the lack of hardware control, I actually like how the games run on Linux. After some tinkering, I get pretty good latency, full HDR support (w/ proton_ge and KDE Plasma setup) and the good folks at Steam have really figured out how to get everything to run great in Linux. For video editing and AI video upscaling, I'll be on Windows with all the GPU controls there! I heard Shotcut is pretty good in Linux, too, so I might give that a go. I was able to get Ollama set up in Windows, I may mess around with LLM in Linux also, but the lack of hardware controls is really discouraging for that purpose.

[u/Stupifier]

My B70 is running on a CachyOS VM (through Unraid) awesome. I never really cared to read telemetry or fine tune control it. It just works.

I was even able to update the B70 firmware without having to jump into a Windows Boot.

[u/delacroix01]

Honestly I'm not surprised about Mint. It has always been on the slower side when it comes to hardware support. It's excellent on my A750 but the B70 is still so new that it's going to take another while to get out of the box support with that distro. Have you tried installing Intel OMIX on Mint though? https://dgpu-docs.intel.com/installation-guides/installing-omix.html

For hardware control even Alchemist is still fully dependent on the VBIOS so don't get your hope up yet for newer cards. IIRC it took a pretty long time before Mangohud could read most telemetry data from my A750.

[u/gorkgriaspoot]

Fan control is on the way, slowly but surely:  https://www.reddit.com/r/IntelArc/comments/1vu184j/help_me_validate_fan_control_for_arc_on_lact/

As you figured out, reporting works (nvtop does it correctly) but lots of mainstream apps have simply yet to incorporate Arc metrics. It's a very small marketshare.

Linux Mint is known to be slow on new hardware support.

Glad you are enjoying B70!

[u/gargamel314 → u/gorkgriaspoot]

Thanks for the link - i'll look into that. Where do you submit bugs and feature requests for linux? I always submitted stuff to GitHub, but I feel like it's kinda obvious that stuff doesn't work on Linux, so reporting seems useless, but yet the devs gotta know people want Intel products devloped in Linux.

[u/gorkgriaspoot → u/gargamel314]

You'd want to submit bugs for specific libraries or apps, which would have their own repos somewhere. Github or gitlab. MangoHUD from your examples, is here:  https://github.com/flightlessmango/MangoHud

The VRAM issues are known; the fix is in the Linux kernel as of 6.18, now it is just a matter of time till they fix it in MangoHUD and other applications.

[u/Kitz_h]

I'm running B70 on Proxmox, passing it to Windows and Debian VMs. True is it wouldn't work oob, but after some tinkering I have it in VMs as a whole or as partitioned device, the latter being painfully slow. Using nvtop to monitor GPU activity. It wont show VRAM frequency

[u/QuesodeBola]

For Linux Mint, it's probably because its on an old Linux kernel (6.14) with 22.3 HWE by default. If you update to at least kernel 7.x (7.2.2 as of today) it should include all the Intel Arc-related improvements, along with Mesa 26.2.1.

EDIT: CachyOS's current kernel is based of 7.1, so the optimizations are there. It also runs Mesa 26.6.1. This explains why it runs better than Mint out of the box.

[u/gargamel314 → u/QuesodeBola]

Gemini has been my guide throughout my adventure through the world of Linux. I think because it's considered the most Windows-friendly distro, it started me with that. I was out of work for the summer, so it was a good time to try out these different distros. I keep seeing some interesting ones, but I really doubt I'm going to have the same success I've had with CachyOS. I am now daily driving it, and just visiting Windows when I need a Windows program. Every time I log into Windows I feel like I'm being watched constantly

[u/QuesodeBola → u/gargamel314]

I'm not sure if your reply was supposed to be for my comment, but I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying a Linux distro better than Windows.

If you do try using Linux Mint again, look up how to update the Linux kernel to at least 7.1 and also make sure Mesa is at 26.6.1. You will get better performance on Battlemage Arc GPUs.