The New Intel Gallium3D OpenGL Driver Performance Is In Great Shape For Mesa 19.1

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The New Intel Gallium3D OpenGL Driver Performance Is In Great Shape For Mesa 19.1

With Mesa 19.1 now under its feature freeze, here is a look at how the new Intel "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL driver is performing for its debut in this next quarterly Mesa feature release. Benchmarks from a Skylake NUC with Intel Iris Pro 580 graphics just wrapped up for looking at the performance of the Intel Gallium3D driver against its existing open-source "i965" Mesa OpenGL driver.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=27833

[JacekJagosz]

Does anybody know if Gallium3D also support Atom graphics, like Cherry Trail? I couldn't find info anywhere.

[Kayden]

Iris supports Apollolake/Broxton but not Cherrytrail. Cherrytrail has 48-bit pointers, but only allows for a 32-bit VMA space, if I recall correctly. It might be possible, but I'm not sure how well our memory management approach would work in such a constrained situation...would be worried about running out of VMA and not being able to easily fix it.

[QwertyChouskie]

Is there a technical reason that the new driver can't support Ivy Bridge/Haswell is is it only a "the hardware's old anyways" type of thing? There's a lot of Ivy Bridge/Haswell hardware still out there in the wild and it would be nice to get these improvements on it too.

[Kayden]

Yes, if it were easy I would have done it. We would probably need a significantly different approach to memory management, and there are myriads of other things that get painful as well. Image management gets a lot more complex. Compiler stuff gets to be significantly different. Broadwell really was a big architectural shift.

This is the first time I've broken compatibility since 2006, I've constantly argued against forking the driver simply because old hardware is old. But at this point there are real advantages to splitting.

[QwertyChouskie]

Thanks for your explanation. A bit sad we won't see the new driver for Ivy Bridge/Haswell, but I totally understand that it would be a huge effort.