Early Intel i965 vs. Iris Gallium3D OpenGL Benchmarks On UHD Graphics 620 With Mesa 19.1

The Iris OpenGL performance with GeeXLab also appeared in good standing for this early-stage Intel Gallium3D driver.

Lastly was the ParaView workstation software where pleasantly like the Iris Gallium3D driver did pull off a few minor performance wins over the very mature i965 driver.

The Iris Gallium3D driver is certainly moving in the right direction and great to see it now in mainline Mesa, which should help the developers in moving the code forward while also opening it up to more users for testing and feedback. Now that it's mainline in Mesa 19.1, assuming it's part of your distribution/PPA/AUR/third-party Mesa package build, it will just be a matter of setting the MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=iris environment variable for using this Gallium3D driver in place of the classic i965 driver for Broadwell graphics and newer.

Hopefully the Iris Gallium3D driver will be mature enough by the end of the year when Icelake hardware is shipping that it could become the default driver at least there, but we'll see how quickly the performance optimizations are ironed out in this driver over the months ahead. Stay tuned for more benchmarks on Phoronix.

Besides performance and better driver efficiency, switching over to a Gallium3D driver opens up other new possibilities like supporting the Gallium HUD, leveraging the Gallium Nine state tracker for D3D9 Windows games running under Wine / Steam Play, and other features afforded to the Gallium3D architecture.