Supposedly the next gen Intel Battlemage cards are coming soon. I’d just wait for those rather than drop the cash on the current cards.
For the driver quality issues, make sure to filter out Windows vs Linux reviews. Intel has historically been way better under Linux than Windows, and they use translation layers under the hood on Windows which is something we're used to on Linux. I heard it's a bit better on Linux.
Kinda like Windows vs Linux for AMD cards, sometimes it's just better on Linux. Only NVIDIA have mostly identical drivers for both platforms and thus is about on-par with performance and stability.
Thanks for the input. Yeah, my research has been more linux specific. My feeling was that Intel would perform well under linux, but browsing around most of what I've been finding are posts from a year ago, and nothing more current. I'm assuming that the cards (and more specifically driver support) would only get better in time (assuming it's not the next optane... haha).
Linux
Shit, just linux.
Use this community for anything related to linux for now, if it gets too huge maybe there will be some sort of meme/gaming/shitpost spinoff. Currently though… go nuts