Linux & Mesa Driver Comparison For Intel Core i5 12600K / UHD Graphics 770

For many of the OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks, the stock Linux 5.13 and Mesa 21.2 stack of Ubuntu 21.10 was "good enough" for the Alder Lake graphics -- sans needing to use the "i915.force_probe=4680" option to have the driver support enabled.

Tesseract was one of the few games seeing any significant boost going from Mesa 21.2 to Mesa 22.0-devel.

One of the few areas where moving to a newer Linux kernel was of benefit was for the NCNN Vulkan compute benchmarks where Linux 5.15 brought some performance improvements and carried through with Linux 5.16.

Basemark's OpenGL benchmark did enjoy some sizable performance boosts with Linux 5.15 compared to the stock 5.13-based kernel of Ubuntu 21.10 too.

Overall though across dozens of benchmarks carried out, this testing ended up being rather "boring" - albeit in a good way. Ubuntu 21.10's stock packages were in good shape for Alder Lake besides needing the force probe option to have accelerated driver support. Only in the test cases noted were there noticeable improvements to find from either the newer kernel or Mesa upgrade. Ubuntu users wanting to enjoy those gains in the areas mentioned can easily run with the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA and the Oibaf PPA for the newer Mesa. We'll keep monitoring the open-source/Linux evolution of Intel Alder Lake so stay tuned for seeing what performance optimizations may be next achieved.