Linux 3.4 Kernel Strengthens Intel Graphics

Up as an extra article from Munich is a comparison of Intel DRM drivers on recent Linux kernel releases while using Core i7 Ivy Bridge hardware. With the Linux 3.4 kernel there are definite Intel Linux graphics performance gains.

This article is comparing the performance of the Linux 3.2.16, Linux 3.3.3, Linux 3.4, and drm-next kernels. The drm-next kernel is based upon the core 3.4 code but with many of the Intel DRM driver updates that will ultimately end up in the Linux 3.5 kernel.

Throughout testing, the rest of the hardware stack remained the same with an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x86_64 installation updated to the Git versions of Mesa 8.1-devel, libdrm, and xf86-video-intel. Benchmarking was done of the Intel Core i7 3770K HD 4000 graphics to look specifically at how the performance has evolved already within the Intel KMS/DRM kernel driver.

Thanks to the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org, it makes benchmarking and analyzing of results very straight forward, easy to perform from remote locations, and execute all tests in a fully automated and reproducible manner.