Intel HD Graphics 4600 Performance On Mesa 10.1-devel

Some of our final Linux benchmarks at Phoronix to end out January are of looking at the Mesa 10.0 vs. 10.1-devel performance for Intel HD Graphics 4600 on a Core i5 processor while running Ubuntu 14.04. Is there much in store for Haswell with this upcoming three-month update to Mesa?

This next Mesa release is very exciting for Radeon and Nouveau users since OpenGL 3.3 support is coming together, but Intel Ivy Bridge and Haswell hardware has already supported GL 3.3 for months with the work done by Intel's Open-Source Technology Center. Intel's driver in Mesa 10.1 has seen many bug-fixes, various OpenGL 4 extensions implemented (but no complete OpenGL 4.0 support), and continued work on hardware enablement for the Bay Trail Atom SoCs and the forthcoming Broadwell processors. We've also seen some performance improvements land for Intel's Mesa DRI driver, so before ending out January we found it appropriate for some new Mesa 10.0 vs. 10.1-devel benchmarks on the Intel side.

This testing was done from Ubuntu 14.04 in its current development form with the Linux 3.13 kernel and Mesa 10.0.1 stable. For easy upgrading to Mesa 10.1-devel and other newer graphics driver packages there is already xorg-edgers for Ubuntu 14.04 (the Oibaf PPA doesn't yet support Ubuntu 14.04). Using xorg-edgers or the Oibaf PPA is one of the easiest ways to upgrade the open-source graphics driver packages on an Ubuntu system.

The system we used for this brief Intel Haswell Mesa comparison boasted an Intel Core i5 4670 processor, 16GB of DDR3-1600MHz memory, and an MSI B85M-P33 motherboard. Aside from upgrading packages via xorg-edgers after the initial Ubuntu 14.04 installation as of earlier this week, the rest of the system remained stock against Ubuntu Trusty Tahr, including its use of Compiz and the Unity 7.1.2 desktop. All of these Intel OpenGL benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux were done via the fully automated and fully reproducible Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking platform.