Another Test Drive With Crocus Gallium3D On Old Intel Hardware

Since Crocus was merged into mainline Mesa last week we have been looking at benchmarks of this new open-source Intel Gallium3D driver designed exclusively for older Intel graphics hardware (i965 Gen4 through Haswell Gen7, plus Cherrvyiew and experimental Gen8 Broadwell) compared to the existing open-source i965 classic driver. Prior articles have looked at the quite good performance with Haswell while Sandy Bridge is in somewhat rough shape. Today's testing is going in the middle and looking at the Crocus vs. i965 OpenGL driver performance for Ivy Bridge with the once great Core i7 3770K.

This round of testing is complementary to the prior Haswell and Sandy Bridge benchmarking but looking at how well these open-source OpenGL drivers in 2021 perform for Ivy Bridge. This benchmarking was done on an Intel Core i7 3770K desktop running Ubuntu 21.04 with the Linux 5.11 kernel.

For the latest Mesa drivers was Oibaf PPA of Mesa 21.2-devel as of Wednesday. Tests were done using the default i965 classic driver and then switching over to Crocus using the MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=crocus environment variable option. Both i965 and Crocus expose OpenGL 4.2 on Ivy Bridge along with OpenGL ES 3.0.