When It Works, Intel Core i5 2500K Graphics On Linux Are Fast!

Written by Michael Larabel in Graphics Cards on 10 February 2011 at 09:47 AM EST. Page 3 of 12. 37 Comments.

Not only is the system free of locking up or other serious problems when using Sandy Bridge on this "Bearup Lake" motherboard, but also the Intel 3D performance is actually quite fast. In fact, considering it is a classic Mesa driver, the Core i5 2500K graphics performance is extremely fast. But as this is a Mesa-based driver, right now you are limited to just OpenGL 2.1 support while the Sandy Bridge hardware is capable of OpenGL 3.0 / DirectX 10.1. Mesa is still limited to OpenGL 2.1 with support for some OGL3 extensions and the OpenGL 2.1 experience isn't perfect either as there are a number of applications/games that are simply broken or impaired with Mesa due to either bugs or missing features, such as no integrated S3TC texture compression support due to patent issues.

The Intel Core i5 2500K graphics with the classic Mesa driver is actually faster than a number of ATI/AMD Radeon HD discrete graphics cards running on a Gallium3D open-source driver. The Gallium3D architecture on Mesa has selling points of easier driver development due to more unified code, is a driver architecture designed around modern GPUs rather than Mesa core's old code-base, and its state tracker capabilities make it possible to easily leverage OpenVG, OpenGL ES, and other APIs atop Gallium3D drivers. There is even a DirectX 10/11 state tracker as well as one for utilizing XvMC (X-Video Motion Compensation) accelerated video playback using GPU shaders on Gallium3D. Intel's Linux developers though have been largely uninterested in Gallium3D due to the significant upfront investment required in rewriting their 3D user-space library with no immediate return. The open-source ATI/AMD developers are now focusing almost exclusively on their Gallium3D drivers and the Nouveau developers working on reverse-engineered NVIDIA support are exclusively. Intel's developers though prove with their Sandy Bridge Mesa driver that it is possible to provide fast OpenGL acceleration on Mesa's old architecture. Granted, last year Intel made significant investments in improving Mesa with rewriting its GLSL (GL Shading Language) compiler, among other work.

Under Microsoft Windows 7, Windows reviews have said the Intel Core i5 2500K is comparable to the discrete NVIDIA GeForce 210 and ATI/AMD Radeon HD 5450 graphics cards. However, on the Linux side, for the NVIDIA/AMD graphics cards you have the choice of drivers to use. You can use the high-performance proprietary drivers, the Gallium3D open-source drivers that run at a fraction of the speed of the proprietary drivers, or in the case of the Radeon graphics cards there's also still the classic Mesa drivers that are even slower. In comparing the Linux performance of the Intel Core i5 2500K to discrete graphics cards under Linux, the Radeon X1800XT, Radeon HD 4550, Radeon HD 5450, and Radeon HD 4830 graphics cards were benchmarked on the ATI side. They were benchmarked on this Sandy Bridge system using both the Gallium3D and proprietary Catalyst drivers (except for the X1800XT that no longer has Catalyst support). For those that may not be familiar with the Linux graphics situation or stumbled across this article as a Windows user, the reason for testing a "vintage" ATI Radeon X1800XT was tested in this comparison with Gallium3D was that it uses a different Gallium3D driver and its overall open-source support is more mature than that of the R600/R700 kernel DRM and Gallium3D driver; there's also some features enabled by default for R500 ASICs not yet turned on in the R600/R700 open-source driver like Hyper-Z and color tiling. With that said, some older ATI graphics cards remain popular with open-source enthusiasts. On the NVIDIA side there was the GeForce GT 220 graphics card when using the Nouveau Gallium3D driver.

To recap, the test system was composed of an Intel Core i5 2500K Quad-Core CPU clocked at its default speeds (3.3GHz; 3.7GHz Turbo Boost), Intel Bearup Lake H67 motherboard, 2GB of OCZ DDR3 system memory, and an OCZ 60GB Vertex 2 Solid-State Drive. On the software side was Ubuntu 10.10 x86_64 with the Linux 2.6.38 development kernel (and the stock Linux 2.6.35 kernel when testing the Catalyst 10.10 driver), GNOME 2.32, X.Org Server 1.9.3 RC1, xf86-video-intel 2.14.0, xf86-video-ati 2.14.0, Mesa 7.11-devel, GCC 4.4.5, and an EXT4 file-system. All testing was done with a stock driver / X.Org configuration.

Via the latest Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" code with OpenBenchmarking.org support, the following test profiles were used: Nexuiz, OpenArena, World of Padman, Warsow, Urban Terror, Tremulous, VDrift, and Lightsmark. These tests are what is capable of running on classic Mesa and Gallium3D drivers while having usually correct OpenGL rendering and at a frame-rate faster than a slideshow targeting the elderly.


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