Older Broadwell Graphics Performance Is Looking Good With The New Intel Gallium3D OpenGL Linux Driver

Synthetic tests like GLMark2 were also indicating a rise in performance for Broadwell with the new Intel driver.

With the OpenGL 4 micro-benchmarks from APITest represented the biggest improvements in switching from the current Intel OpenGL Linux driver to their new Gallium3D solution.

The Java OpenGL text rendering performance was also much better with the Gallium3D driver but there were some regressions in the other areas.

The HTML5 CanvasMark test within Google Chrome was indicating a slight rise in performance with the new Gallium3D option.

Overall, the Intel Gallium3D driver is looking good for Broadwell Gen8 graphics, the oldest Intel generation of graphics supported by their Gallium3D driver. Haswell and older Intel graphics hardware will continue to be supported by their existing i965 driver. The Gen8 results were similar to what we've seen with our many recent Gen9 graphics tests that this Gallium3D driver is quite reliable at this stage and generally offering comparable or superior performance to their i965 driver. If all goes well, the Mesa 19.3.0 stable release around December could be using this driver by default.

More results from this Broadwell graphics benchmarking on Mesa 19.3 can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.