Intel HD 4000 Ivy Bridge Graphics On Linux

Now having looked at the processor performance of the brand new Intel Core i7 3770K "Ivy Bridge" CPU, up now is our first look at the Intel HD 4000 "Gen7" graphics performance for the Ivy Bridge processors under Linux. Building upon what's turned into a huge success for Intel with their Sandy Bridge graphics with admirable performance and stable open-source Linux drivers, Ivy Bridge volleys Intel's Linux graphics capabilities into a whole new realm for those concerned about open-source graphics drivers.

Many articles are in the pipe looking at the Intel Ivy Bridge HD 4000 Linux graphics performance in various configurations and compared to the different open and closed-source Linux graphics drivers available. In this article is a comparison of the HD 4000 graphics on the Intel Core i7 3770K to two Intel Sandy Bridge processors and AMD's Fusion A8-3870K "Llano" Fusion APU.

While the i7-3770K has already been detailed in the earlier Ivy Bridge launch article, on the HD 4000 graphics side there's 16 execution units (up from 12 with Sandy Bridge HD 3000), support for driving up to three displays simultaneously, up to a 2.0x performance improvement for HD 4000 graphics, and support for DirectX 11 / OpenCL 1.1 / OpenGL 3.1 APIs. Like the Sandy Bridge graphics, the graphics core frequency has a base of 850MHz and can run up to 1350MHz. The lower-end Ivy Bridge processors have HD 2500 graphics, which is said to be about a ~10-20% performance improvement over the cut-down HD 2000 Sandy Bridge graphics. This lower-end Ivy Bridge Gen7 graphics core has only six execution units instead of 16.

The triple-display support, video acceleration (via VA-API), and most other graphics features are supported already by the open-source Intel Linux stack. However, there is not yet any Intel OpenCL support on the GPU side and some of the more obscure features like WiDi (Wireless Displays), InTru3D, and Clear Video are not currently properly implemented under Linux.