Does A Greedy Intel Driver Improve Performance?

EXA and UXA performed roughly the same, but when enabling the greedy migration heuristics there was quite the performance boost.

The greedy migration heuristics caused a performance drop here and so did UXA.

As you can see from these Intel 2D metrics, the performance is really scattered across the board depending upon the test. A few generalizations that can be made is that enabling greedy migration heuristics does cause a dramatic performance boost in some areas, but in other areas it will cause a slowdown with EXA. UXA had also performed quite well in some areas, but in other places it dropped like a rock. In several tests we also witnessed the older xf86-video-intel 2.4 driver performing better than the newer xf86-video-intel 2.6 driver does when both were using EXA with the same options. There are clearly some performance problems continuing, as we have been reporting the past few months.

Fortunately though there is an option called git-bisect and there is also the Phoronix Test Suite, so we will be back with more Intel Linux benchmark results shortly.

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