Intel Xe Graphics Are Looking Great On Linux 5.11 With Nice Performance Uplift

While Linux 5.11-rc1 was just released yesterday, we have already been closely monitoring the new features of Linux 5.11 as well as carrying out early benchmarks. One area looking quite good so far are the Intel graphics performance and features with Linux 5.11, or more specifically Gen9 and newer while the latest Xe Graphics are obviously the most interesting from a benchmarking perspective.

The Intel kernel graphics driver has some fun features this time like integer scaling support, big joiner enablement, and more. There is also continued work on Intel discrete graphics enablement that continued with Linux 5.11. Perhaps the most interesting Intel graphics performance work for Linux 5.11 is the async page-flipping support being flipped on and enabled by default for Skylake/Gen9 graphics and newer. See our Linux 5.11 feature overview for more details on the kernel changes this cycle.

I've already been running some Linux 5.9 vs. 5.10 and now 5.11-rc1 benchmarks. On the Intel side one of the first targets being tested was Intel Core i7 1165G7 Tiger Lake given the freshness of the hardware and being quite interesting.

The testing has been done on the Dell XPS 9310 as my lone Tiger Lake system. Linux 5.9.16, 5.10.3, and 5.11-rc1 were tested this round with the same kernel configuration used across the tests. The kernel being changed out is the only difference for this round of Tiger Lake testing. This article is just looking at the graphics performance while a follow-up article will look for other areas of changed system performance on this in-development kernel.

And, yes, the results are quite exciting this round with better performance beyond features like integer scaling....