Mesa 17.0 Benchmarks With Intel: Noticeably Better Vulkan Performance

With Mesa 17.0 due to be released any day now, here are fresh benchmarks of Mesa 17.0's Git code as of Friday compared to Mesa 12.0.6, Mesa 13.0.4, and the current Mesa 17.1-devel Git master code. Not only is the i965 OpenGL driver performance being examined but also the ANV Vulkan driver present since Mesa 12.

For these Mesa 12.0 vs. 13.0 vs. 17.0 vs. 17.1-devel benchmarks an Intel Core i7 7700K "Kabylake" system with HD Graphics 630 were utilized. For those interested in Skylake benchmarks, I'll deliver those shortly in their own follow-up article and potentially Haswell/Broadwell if there is enough reader interest. The i7-7700K was equipped with 2 x 8GB DDR4-3200 Corsair memory, MSI Z270-A PRO motherboard, and a Samsung 950 PRO 256GB NVMe SSD.

The latest Git branches of Mesa 12.0, 13.0.4, 17.0, and Git master (17.1-devel) were tested as of 10 February. The Linux 4.10 Git kernel was used on the system during testing and xf86-video-modesetting on X.Org Server 1.18.4 was the DDX used.

This article is focusing upon the Vulkan and OpenGL performance improvements of the Intel open-source driver stack. For details on the new features, read The Big Changes, Improvements Of Mesa 17.0.