Intel's X.Org Driver Runs Even Faster Now

A week ago we reported that Intel's next X.Org driver (the xf86-video-intel 2.12 DDX) would render text/glyphs faster thanks to optimizations done by Chris Wilson, but this was not all that was in store for this Intel Linux driver that's updated quarterly. With the most recent Git, there are more performance optimizations.

The work merged by Chris last week was his "glyphs" branch, but now this morning he merged what he calls "mega-glyphs" for their UXA acceleration architecture using a routine suggested by Keith Packard. The mega-glyphs support brings rewritten glyph rendering code for UXA. Chris has reported significant speed improvements in the x11perf test thanks to this new code.

While improved 2D performance is nice, there isn't any noteworthy performance enhancements going into their 3D driver component at this time that uses Mesa's classic DRI driver architecture. It is with their 3D/OpenGL performance where the Intel Linux graphics performance is particularly horrible.

The commit that introduces UXA mega-glyphs can be found on the projects Git page and the support can be found in the xf86-video-intel 2.12 release, which is due out in a month or two.