The New Intel Gallium3D OpenGL Driver Performance Is In Great Shape For Mesa 19.1

With Mesa 19.1 now under its feature freeze, here is a look at how the new Intel "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL driver is performing for its debut in this next quarterly Mesa feature release. Benchmarks from a Skylake NUC with Intel Iris Pro 580 graphics just wrapped up for looking at the performance of the Intel Gallium3D driver against its existing open-source "i965" Mesa OpenGL driver.

The Intel Gallium3D driver is one of the new additions coming with Mesa 19.1. Mesa 19.1.0 should debut around the end of May or June and will feature this Gallium3D driver as an experimental option in place of the default i965 driver, but for Broadwell graphics and newer can be activated via the MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=iris environment variable. Intel developers are hoping by the end of 2019 that this Gallium3D driver will be mature enough to enable by default for Broadwell and newer; Haswell and older hardware will continue to be supported by the i965 driver as those older generations of graphics will not be supported by Iris.

Our recent rounds of Intel Gallium3D benchmarking have been quite compelling while this latest round of tests using the Mesa 19.1 code at its feature freeze stage is the most compelling we've seen. Following recent optimizations, this Gallium3D driver is almost across the board faster.

Using the Intel Core i7 6770HQ with Iris Pro 580 graphics, various OpenGL gaming benchmarks and other tests were run atop the Ubuntu 19.04 + Linux 5.0 + Mesa 19.1-devel setup. All of these OpenGL benchmarks were facilitated using the Phoronix Test Suite.