Intel Scores Another Nice Arc Graphics Boost On Linux For Summer 2023

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 25 July 2023 at 11:19 AM EDT. Page 2 of 2. 26 Comments.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive benchmark with settings of Resolution: 1920 x 1080, Renderer: Vulkan. Mesa 23-07-21 was the fastest.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with Vulkan enjoyed another nice boost to the performance as a result of this latest code. For CS Linux gamers, it's great seeing the 21% boost just over the past month.

Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark with settings of Resolution: 1920 x 1080, Graphics Setting: Low. Mesa 23-07-16 was the fastest.
Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark with settings of Resolution: 1920 x 1080, Graphics Setting: Ultra. Mesa 23-07-21 was the fastest.
Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark with settings of Resolution: 2560 x 1440, Graphics Setting: Ultra. Mesa 23-07-21 was the fastest.

The performance difference with Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam Play with the Intel Arc Graphics A770 was minimally impacted by this recent Intel ANV driver work.

Unigine Superposition benchmark with settings of Resolution: 1920 x 1080, Mode: Fullscreen, Quality: Low, Renderer: OpenGL. Mesa 23-07-16 was the fastest.
Warsow benchmark with settings of Resolution: 2560 x 1440. Mesa 23-07-16 was the fastest.
Unvanquished benchmark with settings of Resolution: 2560 x 1440, Effects Quality: Ultra. Mesa 23-07-21 was the fastest.

This latest Mesa optimization work by Intel though is just surrounding the ANV Vulkan driver and thus no changes for the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver beyond the prior round of tuning.

yquake2 benchmark with settings of Renderer: Vulkan, AF: On, MSAA: On, Resolution: 1920 x 1080. Mesa 23-07-21 was the fastest.
yquake2 benchmark with settings of Renderer: Vulkan, AF: On, MSAA: On, Resolution: 2560 x 1440. Mesa 23-07-21 was the fastest.

Even the open-source YQuake2 game with Vulkan was seeing some small uplift from this additional DG2 modifier support.

VKMark benchmark with settings of Resolution: 1920 x 1080, Present Mode: Mailbox. Mesa 23-07-21 was the fastest.
VKMark benchmark with settings of Resolution: 2560 x 1440, Present Mode: Mailbox. Mesa 23-07-21 was the fastest.

The biggest gain from the Intel ANV Mesa code in the past week was found with the VKMark Vulkan benchmark cases... Huge improvements over the prior Mesa state albeit is a rather synthetic test case.

In any event it's great seeing this latest round of optimizing benefit Intel's open-source Vulkan driver following the more broad performance work in the prior round. Paired with the forthcoming fake sparse support, hopefully seeing the Intel Xe kernel driver merged at least experimentally hopefully later this year, and other ongoing Intel Mesa optimizing, it's an exciting summer to be using Intel Arc Graphics hardware with this open-source driver stack.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.