Intel i915 Gallium3D Performance Examined

The i915 Gallium3D driver is much faster for the Qfusion-based Warsow game, but the i945 graphics found in the Apple Mac Mini could only put out a few frames per second.

The classic Mesa driver was favored over i915g for the Xonotic first person shooter.

While the i915 Gallium3D driver offers more OpenGL features and functionality over the i915 classic Mesa driver, and is likely to become the new default i915 through i945 Intel Linux graphics driver, as these benchmarks show the performance isn't always better. The older pre-HD Intel graphics hardware really isn't capable of playing games or other demanding OpenGL workloads well. However, either driver is plenty capable of simply running a composited Linux desktop.