The Current Intel "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL Performance Against i965 Mesa, Windows 10 OpenGL

It's been quite fascinating to watch the development of the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver that has now been in development by their open-source team for more than one year while back in February is where this currently experimental driver was merged into Mesa. It's been over one month since last looking at the Intel Iris Gallium3D performance relative to Intel's default "i965" Mesa OpenGL driver. Here are fresh benchmarks looking not only at their current and next-gen OpenGL Linux driver options but also how that performance compares to their current Windows 10 OpenGL driver.

Using an Acer Aspire laptop with Intel Core i5 8265U "Whiskey Lake" processor and UHD Graphics 620, fresh benchmarks were done using Microsoft Windows 10 and then using Ubuntu 19.04 with the very latest Mesa code for both the i965 driver and the experimental Iris driver option. The same hardware was used throughout the entire testing process for this OpenGL driver comparison.

Those using Mesa 19.1 can try out the Iris driver via the MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=iris environment variable. Via the Phoronix Test Suite a range of OpenGL-using games and applications were benchmarked. As a reminder, the Iris Gallium3D driver is just supported for Intel Broadwell graphics and newer.