Intel's Gallium3D Driver Is Running Much Faster Than Their Current OpenGL Linux Driver With Mesa 19.3

[oleid]

Congrats to the Iris team, and all the devs at Intel on this. [...]

While I'm generally an AMD guy at home, I can recognize that getting to the performance and feature level shown today took a lot of work and dedication.

Well done.

This news perfectly shows, that a shared effort - and nothing else are gallium drivers - benefits the ecosystem as a whole. Hopefully in future Intel contributes more to gallium and the other drivers will profit from their work as well.

[ehansin]

Thanks GrayShade

In my case, neither dmenu nor Firefox would launch, and both are X dependent programs (i.e. the way I launched Firefox it needed X, and dmenu is exclusively X.) My speculation was that they needed XWayland, which still didn't do it, then adding in xf86-video-intel did the trick. Not that it matters, it just got me thinking what I wanted to better understand what worked where.

Here is kind of my point, and I may be off - it would be cool if in the future in a more pure Wayland setup that only Mesa was needed (assuming supported hardware) no matter the GPU manufacturer. But in all honesty, it isn't too big of a deal either way. Anyway, I'm glad to see the Wayland ecosystem progress.


Just wanted to add this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.Org_Server#GLAMOR

Maybe this is a way to run X (XWayland) apps with the need for any vendor/chipset specific DDX 2D drivers. Hmm...

[Veerappan]

This news perfectly shows, that a shared effort - and nothing else are gallium drivers - benefits the ecosystem as a whole. Hopefully in future Intel contributes more to gallium and the other drivers will profit from their work as well.

Agreed. The Intel team hung onto their classic driver for a long time because they knew it and they didn't necessarily believe that the work to transition to gallium was worth the time they'd spend doing it (and the bugs they'd create on the way). AMD (and VMWare/Collabora/Valve/others) did a lot of work to improve gallium and its various state trackers. The work that was done to make the radeon drivers better has helped Intel to transition to a performant gallium-based driver, and now the work that Intel does to improve the gallium infrastructure can help AMD/nouveau/freedreno/vc4/vc5/etnaviv/panfrost/etc as well (and we can hopefully reduce duplication of effort).

I suspect that migrating the classic intel driver over to their nir-based compiler and using it in their Vulkan driver also forced some modularization that made this transition a bit easier as well.