Open-Source Linux Driver Comparison: Skylake HD Graphics vs. Radeon Gallium3D

With my Skylake HD Graphics 530 Linux tests earlier this month from the new Intel Core i5 6600K processor, I compared the performance to several Haswell/Broadwell CPUs as well as AMD APUs. In this article I'm providing some fresh benchmark results of Intel's "Gen9" graphics compared to discrete AMD Radeon GPUs tested on the same Skylake system. All tests were done with Mesa 11.0 code and the DRM-Next code for Linux 4.3.

For this article is the Core i5 6600K graphics compared to AMD's open-source driver stack on the Radeon HD 6570, HD 6870, HD 6950, HD 7950, R9 290, and R7 370. Obviously the Intel HD Graphics aren't meant to compete with the higher-end discrete graphics cards, but I basically tested a range of R600g/RadeonSI hardware just for some interesting metrics and if you're wanting to compare your own Linux system's performance to these results. All tests were done on Mesa 11.0 Git, LLVM 3.8.0, and the DRM-Next kernel that will be merged for Linux 4.3. The Core i5 6600K system had 16GB of RAM and was using the MSI Z170A GAMING PRO motherboard. Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64 was the host operating system with the Xfce 4.12 desktop environment.

A variety of OpenGL tests that work with the i965/R600g/RadeonSI drivers was used for this comparison. All tests were done using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. So if you want to see how your own Linux system compares graphics-wise to these results, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1508284-HA-GPUCOMPAR16.