Intel Sandy Bridge Shines With Mesa 8.0

Running Doom 3 at 1920 x 1080 is sadly not playable with the open-source Intel Linux stack. With low quality settings, the game was averaging just about 15 FPS. No performance improvement was spotted in this configuration between the 7.11 and 8.0-devel builds.

With Nexuiz there was also no major change in performance across the four tested resolutions.

In moving to the Warsow game, we begin to see Mesa 8.0 offer up performance improvements. At the four tested resolutions between 800 x 600 and 1600 x 900, the Mesa 8.0-devel build was faster at every step. On average, the Mesa 8.0-devel release was 10% faster than the Mesa 7.11 release from just six months ago. Warsow at 1600 x 900 with this Linux graphics stack is just under 30 FPS. Hopefully when RC6 is finally enabled by default within the Intel DRM in the mainline Linux kernel it will flip above 30 FPS.