Intel DG2/Alchemist Soon To See Big Performance Boost With Mesa Optimizations

A set of patches were posted this past week by Intel open-source driver engineer Francisco Jerez with pixel pipeline optimizations that help all DG2/Alchemist platforms with double digit percentage improvements.

The tentative patches providing pixel pipeline optimizations can boost the OpenGL and Vulkan performance in the range of 20~40% on DG2 discrete graphics hardware. This isn't just for some basic tasks but workloads like Unigine Valley were nearly 40% higher on Intel DG2-448 hardware, Dota 2 around 30% faster, Xonotic by 14%, and other striking leads.

More numbers on these Intel DG2 pixel pipeline optimizations can be found via this draft MR. Some of the patches in this series are dated from months ago and appear to be part of the overall bring-up of DG2 on Linux and not some unplanned, magical performance discoveries.

Intel DG2/Alchemist bring-up under Linux with their open-source driver very much remains an ongoing task that will hopefully be buttoned up in the next few months for ensuring good support when Intel publicly introduces their new Arc gaming graphics cards.