Intel Linux Graphics On Ubuntu Still Flaky

We next turned to using JXRenderMark for some additional X Render testing. When it came to the transformed blit bilinear operation with a size of 32x32 px, Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3 had its second win. Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3 had nearly 20% more operations per second than did Ubuntu 9.04.

With the gradient + temp texture operation, Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3 came back to a loss. Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3 was nearly 30% slower than Ubuntu 9.04. This ended out our testing.

Well, in two of the eight tests, the newer release of Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3 did better than Ubuntu 9.04. However, in the other six tests, Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3 was running slower than Ubuntu 9.04, which was already a release ridden with Intel graphics problems. Clearly, even with the xf86-video-intel 2.8.0 DDX and Linux 2.6.31 kernel, there are still problems at hand to be addressed. Besides the 2D realm, within Mesa there are regressions where we could not even complete OpenGL tests with the current Karmic stack that had run fine under Ubuntu 9.04. While it cannot be told via benchmarks, Ubuntu 9.10 though is running better with Intel graphics using UXA and is certainly more stable, artifact-free, and causing less problems. As Canonical's Bryce Harrington recently shared, the bug count for the Intel driver within Launchpad has dropped quite a bit. Hopefully though these Intel 2D/3D performance problems will be fixed within the next three months for Ubuntu 9.10. Intel is also busy readying their next-generation IGP, with commits already being made to the open-source stack for a new shader compiler and XvMC support.

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