Test Driving The New Intel Haswell Linux Performance Patch

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Test Driving The New Intel Haswell Linux Performance Patch

Hitting the Intel DRM tree this week was the much anticipated Haswell performance patch that was previously talked up by LunarG for benefiting Valve's OpenGL games on Linux. I've ran a few quick benchmarks today of the new Linux kernel code...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg4MTI

[mczak]

I think that's not too surprising - I didn't really check this but I suspect sample_c refers to the d3d10 opcode of that name.
This means it should affect texture sampling with shadow comparisons. So, you'd need a game using shadow textures to hit this, and I don't think any of these listed do.

[stroyan]

Try lightsmark

You should try lightsmark.
It ran about 1.6 times as fast when I measured it a while ago.

[Gusar]

Since Unigine Sanctuary doesn't work anymore (too bad, it was a nice little demo at only 30MB download size), I went with Heaven. High quality at 1024x768 windowed, using mesa 10.4.1 and kernel 3.19-rc3 on an Intel HD4600:

No patch:

FPS:	20.9
Score:	527
Min FPS: 6.9
Max FPS: 38.1

With patch:

FPS:	 22.0
Score:	 555
Min FPS: 7.3
Max FPS: 38.8

Two things I find funny with this whole thing: One, that there is a magic "go faster" bit. And two, they held the patch back because of vaapi breakage, only to find out the particular feature has been broken since forever anyway . Which I can confirm btw, mplayer-vaapi has broken OSD rendering. mpv renders the OSD differently, so it works fine.

[Kayden]

Since Unigine Sanctuary doesn't work anymore (too bad, it was a nice little demo at only 30MB download size)

Sanctuary and Tropics are both really broken applications, and use a lot of invalid OpenGL. They only worked with a bunch of workarounds in the driver. Heaven 4.0 and Valley are much better - they use modern OpenGL and work quite well. Honestly, they're more representative of the modern Unigine engine anyway. Also, there's Unigine Crypt - http://crypt-webgl.unigine.com/game.html - which basically looks like a WebGL version of Sanctuary. It seems to work fine too.

It wouldn't be hard to fix Sanctuary and Tropics - we'd just need to make the force_glsl_extensions_warn workaround not enable GL_ARB_gpu_shader5. It'd be only a few lines of code. But, nobody's bothered to write it. Patches are welcome.

[Gusar]

Sanctuary and Tropics are both really broken applications, and use a lot of invalid OpenGL.

I know, I found the relevant bug report.

It wouldn't be hard to fix Sanctuary and Tropics - we'd just need to make the force_glsl_extensions_warn workaround not enable GL_ARB_gpu_shader5.

I tried with a simple MESA_EXTENSION_OVERRIDE=-GL_ARB_gpu_shader5, with this no errors are printed during loading, but then instead of starting, the thing bails out with a "Received invalid memory reference signal" error.