Intel's iGPU driver might have been free for longer, but it also wasn't very good. If you tried to run games with it that wasn't a great experience, even with t

Intel's iGPU driver might have been free for longer, but it also wasn't very good. If you tried to run games with it that wasn't a great experience, even with the i5-5676C and its relatively strong Iris Pro graphics. And that wasn't only the hardware being weak relative to modern dedicated gpus, it was also related to driver issues and thus games not running that should have, or not running without crashes. Plus no support for Variable refresh rate. And which driver to pick also needed to be figured out (iris vs i965), that was just confusing. From what I read, game developers hated the driver for its issues. Sure, better than Nvidia, as it mostly just worked (when it worked) and nothing needed to be compiled. On the other hand, AMD switched from fglrx to support radeon and amdgpu when exactly? According to the gentoo wiki that was 2016. And radeon was usable before that, iirc (2014 I wrote in my blog about radeon being better than fglrx to play Witcher 2). That's also not yesterday, and works much better in practice for a long while now. I'm also rather optimistic about how well Intel is likely to support Arc on Linux, but that they will give us better driver support than AMD I wouldn't be certain at all. AMD does a very good job there.