Intel Aiming For Their Gallium3D Driver To Be Viable By Mesa 19.2, Default By EOY 2019

[Michael]

I wonder - will this new driver support older iGPUs? Sandybridge, Haswell, etc?

I could use some Vulkan working on my old Sandybridge laptop

Nope. As mentioned in the article, the Gallium3D driver only supports as far back as Broadwell and will not go back further than that.

This also isn't a Vulkan driver, but just OpenGL. The Intel ANV Vulkan driver also isn't being extended back further than what it already does due to hardware requirements and not wasting resources on a half-baked driver for already slow hardware.

[Kayden]

Has somebody tried gallium9? Does just work?

Venemo and dhewg did a bunch of work and got Starcraft II and Witcher 1 running via nine IIRC. So it ought to work. I haven't tried it personally yet.

[Space Heater]

I wonder - will this new driver support older iGPUs? Sandybridge, Haswell, etc?

An Intel driver developer has said that the reason for only supporting Broadwell and newer is that:

"...BDW+ supports 48-bit addressing which allows the CPU and GPU to share addresses trivially. This means no relocations are required and that's a great driver simplification and performance improvement."

[Lanz]

I have to admit, I'm rather looking forward to Intel's discreet GPU.

[andre30correia]

Wait for reasonable priced Navi cards instead. The next intel GPU card will be a flop as this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740
" Released with enormous fanfare, the i740 proved to have disappointing real-world performance^[1], and sank from view after only a few months on the market"

I hope not, more competion better for us

[Lanz]

Wait for reasonable priced Navi cards instead. The next intel GPU card will be a flop as this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740
" Released with enormous fanfare, the i740 proved to have disappointing real-world performance^[1], and sank from view after only a few months on the market"

I'll be waiting for reviews, don't worry. However, it's a little unfair to shred Intel's offering before it's even out, based on history. If we were to do that for AMD, we could say that Navi will be as disappointing as Vega was. "Wait for Vega" -> Vega arrives, performs worse than nVidia but needs twice the power -> "wait for Navi" -> ... I actually use a Vega 64, simply because I won't buy from nVidia due to their business practices, but I recognize that nVidia makes a better product.