Benchmarking The Intel Ivy Bridge Gallium3D Driver

For the open-source Nexuiz game, the Gallium3D driver was much slower than the classic Mesa driver. At 1280 x 1024, the classic Mesa driver was nearly three times faster.

With OpenArena 0.8.5, the classic Mesa driver was more than twice as fast as the new Gallium3D driver developed by the LunarG employee.

With the newer OpenArena 0.8.8 release, the classic Mesa driver was much faster still. While there's a lot of shared code to Gallium3D drivers via state trackers, there's a common misconception among desktop Linux users that having a Gallium3D driver implies there's good performance and it comes very easy, which isn't exactly the case.