The Loser In Our Windows vs. Linux Tests: Intel Graphics

[Caveira]

Hi Michael, now I understand. Thank you for your great work!

@ChemicalBrother: I never said it wans't interesting, but alone these results could distort the objectives... Your observations on catalyst are great too.

Cheers!!

[garytr24]

on my intel x4500MHD for the last half year or so, my linux drivers outperform my windows drivers noticeably, plus my video playback isn't smooth on windows, I get tearing and stuttering. Maybe Clarkdale is different.

[Kano]

Basically it is a bit unfair when you say that Intel is the loser. I certainly know from my own benchmarks that the Win driver is much better optimizied than the Linux driver. But compared to nvidia binary or fglrx it is very unlikely that those drivers share much code - most likely none. So i hope you compare Win against other OSS driver too when you test with other gfx cards.

[leeyee]

I don't play much 3D games on laptops, so the intel X4500MHD has already been performing well enough at present for me, except the "long lived" slight flickering issue in 2.6.33 drm module.

However, my interest part here is when will Intel really try to move to the gallium3d architecture. I don't expect an aggressive moving as they did when adopting KMS and UXA, but I do look forward to seeing a uniformed linux graphics stack in the near future.

[nanonyme]

and i wonder how much amd still cares about their r500 series. Lucid Lynx will give the answer.

Would be rather ironic if in future people would end up making a backport for r500 from Linux drivers to Windows because the old Catalyst wouldn't run on new Windows versions anymore. :P

[whizse]

There are also some games and OpenGL applications that will run on Windows with Intel Clarkdale graphics, but not even work at all under Linux with Intel's Mesa stack.

Which ones exactly?

[libv]

Quite a lot? We are a minority compared to the Windows side, you can't expect performance parity, at least not this soon.

Remember that a lot of time and effort have gone into bringing the entire graphics stack up to date, performance tweaking, especially for games, haven't been a priority.

So for you, it is a good thing that they "brought the entire graphics stack up to date", what do you mean with this exactly?

What i see is that:
a) basic stability and usability are not exactly that great.
b) backward compatibility, and thus the ability to update to a more stable/working driver is being actively ignored.
c) to top it off, performance is still very very subpar.

All i see is people reinventing things a lot, and making big statements about how great the future will be, and not achieving much of what is real and what is needed by intels customers. Is this what you mean with "bringing the graphics driver stack up to date"?

[Milyardo]

So for you, it is a good thing that they "brought the entire graphics stack up to date", what do you mean with this exactly?

What i see is that:
a) basic stability and usability are not exactly that great.
b) backward compatibility, and thus the ability to update to a more stable/working driver is being actively ignored.
c) to top it off, performance is still very very subpar.

All i see is people reinventing things a lot, and making big statements about how great the future will be, and not achieving much of what is real and what is needed by intels customers. Is this what you mean with "bringing the graphics driver stack up to date"?

With in the past year the intel driver has brought:

- A new Graphical memory manager
- A new 2D hardware acceration architecture
- A new Direct Rendering Interface
- Kernel Modesetting over userspace modesetting
- 3D acceration with Gallium 3D

Pretty much every facet of the driver has changed.
From these changes you these benefits that you didn't have before:

-X Server no longer has to run as root
-X Server can now handle compisiting with AIGLX(Accelerated Indirect Rendering)
-You can change displays and X servers without changing mode
-Two different X server can now have hardware acceleration at the same time.
-Run multiple 3D applications at the same time
-Hardware accelerated Video
-Applications no longer overwrite each others graphic memory when directly rendering to the screen

The Intel Graphics driver stack has improve vastly since one year ago. Sure you lost some FPS when playing games, but the performance optimizations on the new architecture haven't come yet.

[crumja]

Several caveats here:

The tests were run using Mesa 7.7.1. Clarkdale graphics are relatively new and the support and optimization for a new architecture were just recently added. Try Mesa 7.8 or 7.9 instead.

Generalizing about Intel graphics is unfair because their older products (X3100, X4500) are generally on par with or better than on Windows. Again, that's because of more time for optimization and general neglect on the Windows side of things.

[karl]

This is disappointing. Why can't Intel driver share most of the code between Windows and Linux versions? AMD-ATI and NVidia seems to be able to do it with the proprietary driver.