Running The New Intel OpenGL "Crocus" Gallium3D Driver On Sandy Bridge

Merged this past week was Crocus as the new open-source Intel Gallium3D driver developed by the community and used for Gen4/i965 through Gen7/Haswell generations of Intel graphics. This week I ran some Crocus benchmarks on Intel Haswell comparing against the existing i965 classic Mesa DRI driver while in this article are some comparison driver benchmarks using Intel Sandy Bridge graphics for those still running those once popular processors.

This round of Sandy Bridge tests were carried out on an Intel Core i7 2700K processor with HD Graphics 3000 (GT2). While for Haswell there is an OpenGL / OpenGL ES version advantage with Crocus, on Sandy Bridge the same GL/GLES versions are exposed by both i965 and Crocus due to hardware constraints. The Sandy Bridge OpenGL drivers allow for OpenGL 3.3 and OpenGL ES 3.0.

This Core i7 2700K testing was carried out when running Ubuntu 21.04 with the Linux 5.11 kernel while using the Oibaf PPA for the latest Mesa 21.2-devel state as of 17 June. Various OpenGL benchmarks were then carried out when using the default i965 open-source OpenGL driver and then again with Crocus.