Intel Ironlake In 2011 Had Some Gains, Some Losses

The frame-rate for the Warsow game nearly doubled at the start of 2011, but still not a very satisfying frame-rate for the Intel Gen5 hardware at a 1280 x 1024 resolution.

The VDrift performance regressed between 2011Q1 and 2011Q3, which is still an outstanding regression as of mid-December.

In 2011, there were a few Intel Ironlake improvements with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack, but much of Intel's focus this past year has been on maturing the Sandy Bridge support and preparing for the Ivy Bridge hardware that will be launched in a few months. The Intel Sandy Bridge Linux support is now rocking and Ivy Bridge is set to be very impressive under Linux -- stay tuned!

While waiting around for Intel Ivy Bridge, you can see the Intel SNA benchmarks from Ironlake that I published a few weeks back. There's also the 2011 year-in-review articles for the AMD Catalyst driver and NVIDIA's binary blob.