Mesa 9.2 Brings Some Performance Improvements For Intel IVB

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa 9.2 Brings Some Performance Improvements For Intel IVB

With Mesa 9.2 due to be released next month, here's the very latest Git benchmarks of Mesa 9.2-devel on an Intel Core i5 Ultrabook with HD 4000 "Ivy Bridge" graphics compared to the stable Mesa release versions going back to Mesa 8.0.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=18927

[Shirudo]

Great, but...

How long will this last? There's already some newer features or performance improvements that are said to be for IVB/Haswell only, and Sandy is only a couple years old now. When it comes to Nvidia and AMD cards, support goes back about five to six years (I have an old GTX260 from 2008 that is still fully supported and getting all the new features); if Intel drops old cards so quickly (though there isn't too much precedent to back this up, their graphics being junk before Sandy) then I might be somewhat worried as an IVB user.

Sometimes I wish I had held out for Haswell to get the awesome power savings instead of getting IVB, but that would mean I'd have to put up with my previous decrepit, physically broken laptop (three missing keys, man!).