Intel Celeron, Pentium Haswell HD Graphics On Mesa 10.1-devel

In several Phoronix articles I've already shared Mesa 10.1-devel benchmarks of this latest open-source graphics driver code currently under development. Most of the open-source graphics tests at Phoronix are done on higher-end hardware, so for this article we're checking on the latest open-source graphics performance when using the low-end Celeron and Pentium processors of the Haswell generation.

This article provides benchmarks of Ubuntu 13.10 on two different systems in a stock configuration and then when simply enabling the Oibaf PPA for fetching the latest Mesa 10.1-devel Mesa/Gallium3D hardware drivers (Intel / Radeon / Nouveau) along with the updated X.Org graphics drivers and other graphics components. The Oibaf graphics packages make checking out the very latest open-source Linux graphics drivers easy from stable Ubuntu Linux releases. For those more technical-minded Linux desktop users who don't mind getting a bit dirty with packaging, I encourage you to try out the latest open-source graphics drivers. The Oibaf PPA is generally reliable and easy-to-use while the latest upstream code generally has new OpenGL support, greater 2D/3D performance, and other new functionality not otherwise shipping until future stable releases of Ubuntu Linux.

The first system we're testing in this article is the Acer C720 Chromebook with Intel Celeron 2955U dual-core 1.4GHz Haswell processor with 2GB of RAM. Again, the tests are of Ubuntu 13.10 against the latest updated Oibaf Saucy packages as of mid-December: Mesa 9.2.1 vs. Mesa 10.1-devel is the key comparison.

Following the Intel Celeron Mesa 10.1-devel results are the Pentium G3220 Mesa 10.1-devel benchmarks from the Lini PC.

You can easily run your own Linux graphics driver benchmarks in an automated and professional-grade manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software.