The Latest Performance Of Intel Gallium3D

Following the work by Google at the end of June to implement sRGB textures in the Intel i915 Gallium3D driver, new Phoronix benchmarks were conducted to see how the Intel Gallium3D driver now compares performance-wise to the classic i915 driver when using an Intel Atom i945 netbook.

Following the sRGB texture support by the Google Chrome team to Mesa i915g, OpenGL 2.1 compliance is now advertised -- this is even better than the i915 classic DRI driver that only advertises OpenGL 1.4. However, with this commit, it is now believed the i915g driver has effectively come to the end of the line with the driver being pushed as far as it can. So let's see how the two i915 drivers are performing.

In this article are benchmarks of the Intel i915 "classic" and i915 Gallium3D drivers when running on a Samsung NC10 netbook with an Intel Atom N270 CPU and i945 chipset. Ubuntu 12.10 was used as the base operating system with the Linux 3.5 kernel and xf86-video-intel 2.19 DDX while Mesa 8.1-devel was pulled from Git in late June following the sRGB commit. Mesa 8.1-devel was built with LLVM 3.0.

Mesa 8.1-devel did have a few problems with Unity 5.12 when it came to missing icons on the launcher and black areas of the screen.