Intel Sandy Bridge Speeds Up On Linux 3.1 Kernel

In the last ioquake3-based game tested, Urban Terror, its frame-rate went up by 25% with this Linux 3.1 kernel code.

The Warsow frame-rate went up by 31% on this Sandy Bridge notebook when pulling in the Linux 3.1 kernel graphics driver.

The smallest performance improvement from any of these six tests was with Lightsmark where the gain from the Linux 3.1 kernel Intel DRM was only 9%. Still, it is a very nice improvement alone, but it is on top of the many other DRM, Mesa, and xf86-video-intel driver improvements made in recent months for SNB/IVB.

It is nice to see Intel's continued performance improvements to their open-source Linux graphics driver, among other enhancements. It will be incredibly interesting to see how well the Intel Linux driver is performing by the time the Ivy Bridge hardware launches. The test results from this article today are available on OpenBenchmarking.org via the 1107266-LI-INTELLINU13 result file.

More Linux 3.1 kernel testing is on the way soon as I am back from Norway and the Berlin Desktop Summit.