Intel Gallium3D Driver Performance Is Looking Good With The Core i9 9900KS

With Mesa 20.0 expected to ship the "Iris" Gallium3D driver as the default Intel OpenGL Linux driver for Broadwell hardware and newer, I've been ramping up my testing of this open-source driver in recent weeks. For adding to the various generations of CPUs tested, here are some numbers of the latest code when using the UHD Graphics 630 off the high-end Core i9 9900KS processor.

Similar to our findings on other processors from Broadwell through Ice Lake, the Intel Gallium3D driver is rocking! Besides OpenGL 4.6, the performance for this new driver is generally far better off than the classic "i965" OpenGL driver in Mesa.

With the Core i9 9900KS I ran some comparison tests using the Linux 5.5 Git kernel and Mesa 20.0-devel as of this week.

In most OpenGL workloads, the Intel Gallium3D driver is showing mighty impressive results!

On a geometric mean basis across many different GL workloads, the Gallium3D driver comes out to being about a solid 5% faster on the Core i9 9900KS. Hopefully Intel is able to stick to their plans of enabling this driver by default for Mesa 20.0 due out around the end of February. See all of these Intel OpenGL benchmark results in full via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.