Intel Haswell Linux Performance For Valve's Source Engine Games

Earlier this week I delivered some 13-way AMD open-source Linux GPU benchmarks when tested against Valve's Source Engine powered Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Source games. Now up for testing from the Steam Linux client on Ubuntu is the Intel open-source Mesa graphics driver performance with Core i7 "Haswell" graphics.

The results in this article add in Intel HD Graphics 4600 on Linux when tested against some of the lower-end AMD Radeon graphics cards used in the last article. Only open-source drivers are being compared. As detailed in length in the AMD article, there aren't any Nouveau benchmarks for the Source Engine games since the rendering with this open-source reverse-engineered driver is still faulty.

When testing HD Graphics 4600 on the Core i7 4770K with Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Source, both games played fine without any rendering issues. The test configuration for this article was Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64 with the Linux 3.12 mainline kernel, Xfce 4.10 desktop, X.Org Server 1.14.3, Mesa 10.0-devel Git from the Oibaf PPA, and the xf86-video-intel 2.99.905 DDX driver.

The first benchmarks to share are when comparing the Haswell HD Graphics 4600 to the Radeon HD 4550, HD 4650, HD 4670, HD 4830, HD 4850, and HD 6450 graphics cards from their open-source AMD Linux driver on the same system. See the other AMD 13-way comparison for more discrete graphics card benchmarks. Following this comparison are some more standalone results for HD Graphics 4600 at various resolutions.

All of this benchmarking was handled via the Phoronix Test Suite where on our open-source cross-platform automated benchmarking software it's as easy as running phoronix-test-suite benchmark tf2 cstrike to carry out the tests in a reproducible manner.