A 13 Line Patch That Boosts Intel Sandy Bridge Performance

Running the latest Intel Mesa Linux driver code is quite beneficial for the Warsow game. Now the Intel Linux driver is faster than the Windows Sandy Bridge driver at 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768 resolutions. While not many people still game with such low resolutions, at 1280 x 1024 and 1920 x 1080 the frame-rate is also higher than where it was a month ago under Linux. At 1920 x 1080 for Warsow, this is also important as the game previously was hovering just around 30 FPS.

For those enjoying the Urban Terror game, this latest Mesa work boosts the Intel Core i5 2500K frame-rate by 17% on average for the four resolutions that were tested.

The only game where there has been a hard regression over the past month is with the ioquake3-powered Tremulous game, but that particular open-source game tends to be quirky at times anyways. With the latest code, the Tremulous frame-rate is capped and well below where it was a month ago. It is hovering around 30 FPS, which may mean it is synchronizing to vblanks, but the Phoronix Test Suite does set the vblank mode automatically.