Mesa 9.2 Can Boost Intel Haswell Graphics 30~40% On Linux

The GpuTest Plot3D workload, which utilizes GL3 functionality, is the only test conducted where there is a performance regression in moving from Mesa 9.1 to Mesa 9.2.

Other tested GpuTest scenarios on the new v0.5.0 release saw steady performance improvements for Intel Haswell on Mesa 9.2.

Overall, the Intel Haswell performance improvements found with Mesa 9.2 are excellent. For some of the tested Linux games the performance was commonly up by 30~40% over Mesa 9.1 stable. Other workloads saw other steady performance improvements while there was only one OpenGL 3 test scenario where the performance had regressed over the current stable driver. Beyond the improved Intel OpenGL performance, Mesa 9.2 also has other new features making the upgrade very worthwhile now or when released as stable in about one month's time.