An Initial Look At The Intel Iris Gallium3D Driver Performance

The Xonotic performance was still siding with the classic driver, but I was surprised to see how well Iris is already performing.

Considering the Intel developers haven't yet invested in optimizing the Iris Gallium3D driver for optimal performance but rather just getting the driver working and to feature parity with their long-standing i965 Mesa driver, the performance of Iris is looking very good at this early stage. With having tested the past unofficial Intel Gallium3D drivers over the years like LunarG ILO, i965g, and i915g, Iris is really off to a great start and actually working well. While these were just some basic OpenGL tests, it's performance is looking quite good and this effort should likely pay off especially once Intel releases more powerful graphics hardware. As Iris matures into 2019, I'll certainly be back with more benchmarks of this interesting Intel OpenGL driver.