How Haswell OpenGL Performance On Linux Changed In 2015

Lastly, some synthetic results via GpuTest.

There are some measurable performance improvements to report on for the synthetic OpenGL results via GpuTest when using the newer Mesa + kernel code, but as shown by the data on the previous page it didn't translate into any real-world performance improvements for this Haswell Iris ultrabook.

From tests I did a year ago, the Haswell OpenGL Linux driver was catching up to the Windows driver. Those tests were done from a Core i7 4790K Devil's Canyon desktop system and not an ultrabook. I also haven't looked to see if any Intel Windows driver releases in 2015 have upped the performance game there or whether for Haswell the performance is still close between operating systems. That may be something I'll explore as a follow-up article if there are enough Phoronix Premium members interested in seeing some fresh Windows vs. Linux results for Haswell - let me know.

While the performance didn't change much for Haswell on Linux this year compared to say the sizable open-source AMD performance improvements, at least the Intel Mesa driver has matured much, is working for more and more Steam Linux games, and the driver is nearly at OpenGL 4 support while it did manage to cross off recently OpenGL ES 3.1 support.