Intel UHD Graphics 770 / Alder Lake GT1 Linux Graphics Performance

Published yesterday was the Core i5 12600K / Core i9 12900K Linux review looking at the exciting performance uplift provided by Alder Lake. One of the areas only talked about briefly in yesterday's article were the UHD Graphics 770 found with these new desktop processors, due to time constraints with only having a few days so far for carrying out tests. Today the initial batch of UHD Graphics 770 / ADL-S GT1 Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks have wrapped up to show how the Intel graphics performance compares to prior generation Rocket Lake as well as AMD's Ryzen 7 5700G.

Wrapped up for today are the preliminary Linux graphics benchmarks for the Core i9 12900K and Core i5 12600K. Both of these processors are equipped with Intel UHD Graphics 770 while the i9-12900K features a maximum dynamic frequency of 1.55GHz and the i5-12600K graphics clock up to 1.45GHz. The UHD Graphics 770 / Alder Lake S GT1 feature 16 texture mapping units, 256 shading units, and 8 ROPs.

The open-source Intel Linux graphivs driver stack has brought up this Alder Lake support over the past year, building off the existing Gen12 / Xe Graphics architecture. As covered in our launch-day Alder Lake Linux review, the main support caveat is that the i915 kernel driver doesn't enable Alder Lake S graphics by default until the now in-development Linux 5.16 kernel... The recently released Linux 5.15 continues to have the support disabled by default. Fortunately, those on recent versions of the Linux kernel can still work around this by using the i915.force_probe=4680 kernel parameter to enable ADL-S graphics support. This option has been working out fine for my testing with the Linux 5.15 kernel.

In user-space, my initial testing has been with Mesa 22.0-devel via the Oibaf PPA on Ubuntu 21.10. The latest Intel ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D driver code has been working out fine when running on a kernel with ADL-S graphics enabled.

For this round of testing all integrated graphics were freshly re-tested using Linux 5.15 + Mesa 22.0-devel on Ubuntu 21.10. The Core i5 12600K and Core i9 12900K testing was on the ASUS STRIX Z690-E GAMING WIFI motherboard and 2 x 32GB DDR5-4400 Corsair memory as the only DDR5 memory I currently have access to.

Comparison benchmarks were carried out to prior generation Core i9 11900K Rocket Lake and on the AMD side was the Ryzen 7 5700G APU. Both the i9-11900K and Ryzen 7 5700G were tested with DDR4-3600 memory speeds.

First up are various native Linux game tests and other graphics benchmarks followed by various Steam Play benchmarks.