Intel Haswell OpenGL & Vulkan Testing With Mesa Git

It's been a while since last running any major Linux graphics tests with Intel Haswell era hardware, but in preparing for a big Linux 3.x/4.x kernel comparison with a Core i7 Haswell, I ran some fresh graphics benchmarks with OpenGL and Vulkan.

The system used for testing is an Intel Core i7 4790K Devil's Canyon rig with HD Graphics 4600. The system had a clean install of Ubuntu 16.10 x86_64 where i ran some out-of-the-box tests followed by tests of Mesa Git (12.1-dev this week, now 13.0 Git) and then a third run with the Mesa Git Padoka PPA stack paired with the Linux 4.9 Git kernel.

Thus it's a very fresh look at the Vulkan and OpenGL experience with Haswell. With the upcoming Mesa 13.0 release (and on Mesa Git master), OpenGL 3.3 is still the latest version exposed... Floating around for a while has been the FP64 patches for Haswell Mesa to enable OpenGL 4.0 with this generation of Intel GPUs, but they have yet to be merged and thus will not be found in next month's Mesa 13.0 stable release. So sadly Haswell is still at GL 3.3 for now but hopefully it won't be too much longer before it sees FP64 for GL 4.0. Broadwell and newer graphics hardware has OpenGL 4.5 with the upcoming Mesa 13.0.

Also tested was Dota 2 with Vulkan. The Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver does work for Haswell GPUs.

The Intel ANV driver exposes Vulkan 1.0 with Haswell. I believe this is my first time testing Vulkan with Haswell compared to my extensive Broadwell and Skylake testing. While Haswell is much slower, Dota 2 was running and it appeared to render the game correctly. Other Phoronix readers though have reported Haswell Vulkan Linux issues previously with this combination not being as well vetted by the open-source drivers as with the newer and more powerful hardware.

During the testing of this latest code, I did encounter what appeared to be some messed up damage tracking when using Firefox on this system.

Well, on the following pages are some results of this i7-4790K Haswell system with OpenGL and Vulkan on Mesa Git and Linux 4.9. All tests done by the Phoronix Test Suite.