Intel Arc Graphics Enjoy Nice ~10% Speedup With Recent Open-Source Linux Driver

Outside of gaming in other graphical workloads from synthetic graphics benchmarks to the ParaView visualization software there were also healthy improvements to the performance picked up. Not bad at all considering this is effectively just a one-month look at the open-source Intel Linux graphics stack from the Mesa side and not even taking into account optimizations merged earlier this year and last year to both the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan and Intel i915 kernel drivers. The Intel Xe kernel driver is also on the horizon that is likely to yield further performance improvements too for that in-development replacement to the i915 kernel driver for recent Intel graphics hardware. It's also with the Intel Xe kernel driver where Arc Graphics will yield more opportunities for Linux gamers with having sparse texture support and other functionality needed to run more modern (Steam Play) games on Linux. That's also why some of the gaming tests in this article are still limited is due to still not having the sparse texture support for upstream i915 and ANV Vulkan (see this ticket https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/5003 for more background information).

When taking the geometric mean of the selection of graphics benchmarks run, over the past month the Intel open-source Mesa graphics performance is roughly 10% faster.