Mesa 7.4 Through Mesa 7.9 Benchmarks With Intel Graphics

Over the next few weeks there are a number of new Phoronix benchmarks to be published concerning the performance of Mesa 7.9 for both the Mesa classic and Gallium3D drivers from the different GPU vendors. Included in those tests will be new Intel Mesa benchmarks of their only officially supported 3D driver using one of the Arrandale processors, but for those currently missing out on the X Developers' Summit in Toulouse or PhoronixFest at Oktoberfest, here's a bonus article. For this extra round of benchmarking, we took one of the original Intel Atom benchmarks with i945 graphics and ran it with every major Mesa release since Mesa 7.4.

The netbook used for testing was a Samsung NC10 with an Intel Atom N270, Intel 945GME + ICH7-M motherboard, 2GB of system memory, a 32GB OCZ Core SSD, and the Intel 945GME Express IGP with 256MB of shared memory. Every major Mesa release since 7.4 was checked and built from the Git source-code, which included versions Mesa 7.4.4, 7.5.2, 7.6.1, 7.7.3, 7.8.2, and 7.9-devel. The Git code was all pulled on 12 September. The rest of the software stack was comprised of an Ubuntu 10.10 Beta installation with the Linux 2.6.36-rc3 kernel, GNOME 2.31.90 desktop, X.Org Server 1.9.0, xf86-video-intel 2.12.0, GCC 4.4.5, and an EXT4 file-system.

The tests ran via the Phoronix Test Suite included OpenArena, World of Padman, Smokin Guns, Tremulous, and Urban Terror.