Intel Iris Gallium3D Driver Lands Support For Broadwell Graphics

The in-development Iris Gallium3D driver that is being developed as Intel's next-gen, open-source OpenGL Linux graphics driver started out with supporting Skylake graphics and newer. But now with the latest Iris driver code, the hardware support has been extended to cover Broadwell graphics.

With Intel Broadwell graphics hardware not being radically different from Skylake, the latest Iris Gallium3D code has made the necessary changes to provide initial support for Broadwell. This is great news if you are still rocking an older Broadwell CPU, like the still very capable Core i7 5775C with its Iris Pro Graphics 6200 with eDRAM.

This preliminary support was merged over the weekend in a few commits. The work appears to have been led by Red Hat's David Airlie while merged by Iris lead developer Kenneth Graunke of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center team.

Broadwell will likely be as far back as the Iris Gallium3D driver goes for this new OpenGL driver considering there is already mature support for older generations on i965. Iris is more focused on being a forward-looking, performant driver for Skylake and beyond. Presumably Iris will be extended for supporting OpenGL on Intel's 2020 "Xe Graphics" discrete hardware due out initially in 2020. This Iris driver hasn't yet been merged into mainline Mesa but that is expected to happen in 2019.

Earlier this month I ran some initial Intel Iris Gallium3D performance benchmarks and those numbers are already looking good, especially when considering there hasn't been much focus on performance optimizations yet but rather just getting the base support in order.