A 13 Line Patch That Boosts Intel Sandy Bridge Performance

Beginning with Nexuiz, the speed improvement from this patch is nothing short of amazing. The frame-rate for this game on high quality settings had improved by 3.57x time on average at resolutions between 800 x 600 and 1920 x 1080. The Intel Linux OpenGL performance is now actually close to the Intel Windows driver performance with this game! At 1920 x 1080, the latest Linux stack had produced an average frame-rate of 15 FPS while the Windows driver was at 17 FPS and then the Linux code from a month ago was at a mere three frames per second.

This VS thread patch, however, does not make for remarkable improvements in all tests. With OpenArena there was no change in performance from this patch or any other DRM and Mesa work over the past month. Fortunately, at least for this ioquake3 game, the Sandy Bridge graphics under Linux are playable even at 1920 x 1080. The Intel Windows driver though still leads by approximately 53%.

With World of Padman, another ioquake3 game, there were frame-rate boosts with the latest Linux code, but only at the lower resolutions. At 800 x 600, the frame-rate was now elevated by 24%, but at 1920 x 1080 there was virtually no change in performance.