Ubuntu 12.04 Git'ed With Intel Ivy Bridge

As the Intel Ivy Bridge benchmarks being delivered on Phoronix and coming up in the coming days are frequently using the latest Intel Linux graphics development stack, for those curious here is a comparison between the stock Ubuntu 12.04 packages and when running the latest Linux kernel / Mesa / libdrm / xf86-video-intel Git DDX.

While the Intel Linux graphics stack continues to improve a lot, since it isn't trivial for end-users to upgrade their open-source Linux graphics driver due to all of the interconnected components -- including needing to upgrade the kernel itself -- most users won't see the recent Ivy Bridge Linux improvements until upgrading to Ubuntu 12.10 later in the year or whatever Linux distribution you happen to be using.

From the Intel Core i7 3770K with the HD 4000 graphics this comes down to a comparison between the Linux 3.2 / Mesa 8.0.2 packages as found in the "Precise Pangolin" release compared to the development versions of Linux 3.4 and Mesa 8.1. The xf86-video-intel DDX and libdrm were also pulled from Git. This testing (and Git pulling) was done on the 19th of April. (There is a long queue of articles to be published while I am out in Norway and Germany for a few weeks taking care of other business.)