Mesa 9.1 Delivers Faster Intel OpenGL Graphics

With Mesa 9.1 nearing its release next month and having been branched from master as of this week, here are some new benchmarks looking at the Intel HD 4000 "Ivy Bridge" graphics performance when testing Mesa 9.1-devel Git to Mesa 9.0.2, 8.0.5, and 7.11.2. Overall, Mesa 9.1 delivers an OpenGL performance boost for the latest-generation Intel hardware.

Last week I delivered the benchmarks of Intel Ivy Bridge graphics comparing the DRM kernel drivers from Linux 3.2 to Linux 3.8. Those results looking at the kernel-side of Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver stack weren't too interesting. However, under the microscope today is Intel's 3D user-space side with their Mesa DRI driver. The Mesa Git branches of master/9.0/8.0/7.11 were tested to deliver a comparison of Mesa 9.1-devel git-9aadc3a, Mesa 9.0.2 git-0f687f8, Mesa 8.0.5 git-a8ff9a4, and Mesa 7.11.2 git-1bdf31e. This release provides a look at the Intel Mesa performance going back to mid-2011.

At the heart of this testing was an Intel Core i7 3770K "Ivy Bridge" processor with integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics to represent the latest-generation hardware until the exciting launch of Haswell in the near future. All benchmarking was handled in a fully automated and reproducible manner using the Phoronix Test Suite GPLv3-licensed software.