Intel pushing into the gpu space is so obviously them trying to get the public to R&D AI hardware since Nvidia is so far ahead of everyone in that game.
It would be great if they accidentally did some good, but it's not something they are going to keep getting better at.
A Linux optimized GPU would be an interesting product, even if its still just R&D for an entirely different goal
Ironically a field where AMD sucks at too. Though, there has been some good progress & fixes with ROCm recently. I don't mind a win / win situation between Intel & consumers though. The gpu market is seriously fucked for quite a while now and some more competition would really help.
I'm skeptical about how much another competitor would help...if intel can offer a comparable product, they'll get right in on the price gouging too. Why wouldn't they?
Serious question: Was there ever an intel GPU which could be used to play 3d graphics intensive games? The only chips I came across so far were woefully underperforming laptop chips with fancy names.
The Arc 7 series GPUs were aimed at gaming. They didn't generally perform on par with the competition, and there were driver issues at launch. IIRC they just couldn't run anything DirectX 9 or older, but performed ok on newer games.
Their driver support supposedly has gotten a lot better, but I can't confirm myself. I did get their cheap a380 for an encoder card for my Jellyfin server because it's pretty much the cheapest offering with an AV1 hardware encoder. It's working great for that so far.
arc A750/770 was ~AMD RX 6600/XT or Nvidia 3050/3060 performance, just with (significantly) worse drivers where whether a game would run properly was a flip of a coin