Every step Intel makes toward parity with established gaming GPUs makes me hopeful that we'll soon have competition driving down prices.
Sparse for the (two decade old) i915 driver is fine if you only need x86-64 support which would probably be most of us. Other architectures that could use the new Xe driver for DG2 (Alchemist) still wont have HUC ("for AVC/HEVC/VP9/AV1 low power encoding bitrate control, including CBR, VBR, etc encoding") right? https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/xe/kernel/-/issues/234
Intel kinda backed itself into a smelly corner with its consumer GPU card debut. A year in and it's still quite a mess.
I wish they didn't need blobs for full functionality. Well, they can make their dGPUs extrauseful by opening source of firmware.
