Mesa 17.0 Benchmarks With Intel: Noticeably Better Vulkan Performance

A lot of the Intel Linux graphics driver developers these days are focused upon the Vulkan driver and kernel DRM improvements with their i965 Mesa driver being rather mature.

Xonotic saw a tiny performance boost with Mesa 17.0+.

So the Vulkan results were quite exciting for Intel with Mesa 17.0, but the OpenGL performance was rarely changed. At least no big regressions in the selection of games used. Really great though to see the Vulkan performance improvements, particularly for Dota 2 where the Vulkan performance is faster than OpenGL. In the forums express your interest if you want to see a similar Mesa comparison done for older Skylake~Haswell era hardware.

For those interested in RadeonSI/RADV Mesa 13.0 vs. 17.0 benchmarks, see these numbers from the other day.