Intel's Linux Graphics Driver Developers Discover 3~20% Boost For Current-Gen Hardware

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel's Linux Graphics Driver Developers Discover 3~20% Boost For Current-Gen Hardware

Last week was the Intel Gallium driver one line patch to boost performance by 1%. Today's code churn within Mesa for Intel's open-source Linux graphics drivers were larger but also with a more profound performance impact with some workloads now being faster by around 20%. Making this more exciting is that today's round of driver optimizations apply to the very common and mature "Gen 9" graphics hardware...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Linux-Graphics-Gen9-Boost

[microcode]

Cool, these all add up. I'm glad somebody is going in and finding these small efficiencies. You'd have spent your day productively if you improved worst case shader runtime by 1%, so finding that somewhere else is nothing to sneeze at!

[tildearrow]

Waiting for Linux vs. Windows GpuTest benches to see if we finally are capable of Windows levels of performance in these benchmarks.

Wait, just 8%?! While it definitely does put the hardware at Windows levels in most tests, it doesn't for Triangle, which demands a 100% boost...........

[Kayden]

Triangle is pretty much all about having the presentation path issues ironed out - like glxgears, it's just "how fast can I put this boring image on the screen." It basically boils down to whether or not you're doing color compression and passing that all the way from 3D to the display. Your window manager/compositor can impact that, as can your X server, whether you have a non-default xorg.conf.d option, and so on. Or if you're using Wayland, the compositor you're using there matters too. And possibly Xwayland settings.

It's not really representative of the 3D driver's performance. Real programs are better for that. :)

[Snaipersky]

Holy balls. Shame there's so few options for iris GPUs. Hopefully Intel gets in the game for apu-type chips (weaker CPU to accommodate a capable GPU).

[mifritscher]

While not be addressed by this patch, this approach could help broadwell as well.

[grigi]

whether you have a non-default xorg.conf.d option,

Could you clarify what that option does? Is it recommended to be enabled for regular Intel IGP's on a regular Xorg desktop? (e.g. UHD 620, kabylake GT2)

[nils_]

Holy balls. Shame there's so few options for iris GPUs. Hopefully Intel gets in the game for apu-type chips (weaker CPU to accommodate a capable GPU).

There are pretty significant GPU updates coming with Ice Lake, so you'll likely get your wish. I'm not sure if I'll just pick up a Renoir Laptop next or stick with Intel, though the regular GPU in my Whiskey Lake is powerful enough for my purposes.

[Snaipersky]

There are pretty significant GPU updates coming with Ice Lake, so you'll likely get your wish. I'm not sure if I'll just pick up a Renoir Laptop next or stick with Intel, though the regular GPU in my Whiskey Lake is powerful enough for my purposes.

I'm looking forward to a more home theater/console type chip. The 3400g is almost there, but support for APUs seems to be spotty. If Intel can make a competent offering, along the lines of an i5 with 1050-1050ti performance, that's what I'll go for, otherwise I expect the 4400G to reach that bar.

[devius]

Remember when you could tell exactly what kind of hardware an article was talking about without having to memorize a ton of SomethingLake code names? I do... Pentium, Pentium 2, Pentium 3. Those were the days