Windows 10 vs. Linux OpenGL/Vulkan Driver Performance With Intel Icelake Iris Plus Graphics

With picking up the Dell XPS 7390 with Intel Core i7-1065G7 for being able to deliver timely benchmarks from Intel's long-awaited 10nm+ Icelake generation, one of the first areas we have been testing is the Iris Plus "Gen 11" graphics performance. In this article are our initial Windows 10 vs. Linux graphics performance numbers for Ice Lake.

For this very first Intel Iris Plus Gen11 graphics testing are results from Windows 10 compared to Ubuntu 19.10. Ubuntu Linux was benchmarked with its stock driver stack comprised of Mesa 19.2.1 as well as opting for the "Iris" Gallium3D driver and also testing Mesa 19.3-devel both with the default i965 OpenGL driver and the Iris Gallium3D driver. Of course, for the Vulkan tests on Linux is their sole "ANV" Vulkan driver.

The Dell XPS 7390 was equipped with the Intel Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake processor and its Iris Plus Graphics, 2 x 8GB LPDDR4 3733MHz memory, 500GB Toshiba NVMe solid-state drive, and 1920x1200 panel.

Benchmarks of the Intel Core i7-1065G7 across various Linux distributions and looking closely at this Ice Lake processor performance compared to its predecessors is coming in future articles, as well as Windows 10 vs. Linux metrics there, while this article is solely looking at the OpenGL/Vulkan driver performance between the platforms.

It is worth noting before getting to the performance results is that the Linux 5.3 + Mesa 19.2 (and Mesa 19.3-devel) driver stack was working out well as tested on Ubuntu 19.10. I did not run into any stability issues with the Gen11 graphics, no rendering problems with the workloads tested, no issues reported via dmesg, or anything else along those lines. Intel's open-source developers have been working on the Gen11/Icelake graphics code for a long time now and with Mesa 19.2 + Linux 5.3 the support appears to be in quite good shape, at least from my experiences with this retail Dell XPS 7390 laptop.