Intel's Iris Gallium3D Driver Gets A 1 Line Patch To Bump The Performance By ~1%

Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver as their new OpenGL Linux driver aiming to be the default Mesa driver by year's end continues seeing more performance optimizations now that the fundamentals are in place. The latest optimization is a one line tweak yielding around one percent higher performance across the board.

With Iris catching up to OpenGL feature parity with the classic "i965" Mesa driver and the overall Iris driver performance being quite good at this stage, the Intel open-source developers have been looking for other areas for optimization with this driver in maximizing its performance potential atop the Gallium3D architecture while continuing to leverage the NIR compiler stack, etc. They remain on track to transition over to Iris Gallium3D by default around year's end but for this quarter's Mesa 19.2 release it's already very usable and should be ready for enthusiasts.

The new optimization for Iris is simply the tuning of the batch size. With the one line patch increasing the batch size, they are seeing around 1% higher performance across the board. Every little bit counts and especially nice when seeing such minor optimizations apply broadly to the performance.

With Mesa 19.2 entering feature freeze soon, I'll have more Intel Iris Gallium3D benchmarks out shortly from the newest driver code.