Mesa 11.3 Isn't A Game Changer For Intel's Haswell

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 19 May 2016 at 12:48 PM EDT. 3 Comments
INTEL
OpenGL tests I published yesterday show that Intel Broadwell graphics are much faster with Mesa 11.3 -- and that's on top of the newly-minted OpenGL 4.2 support -- but the same can't be said for Haswell.

After being surprised by the significant Linux gaming performance improvements for Broadwell, I fired up an Intel Haswell powered ASUS ultrabook to see if there were similar improvements there. Unfortunately, there isn't. Most of the results with Mesa 11.3 on this Haswell system were the same as Mesa 11.2.

For this next Mesa release in June, the Haswell support is still bound to OpenGL 3.3 compliance. It won't be until the next Mesa release, three months later, when there will likely be OpenGL 4 support for Haswell, as previously acknowledged by Intel developers. In the next release, only Broadwell and newer Intel graphics will have OpenGL 4.x support.
Mesa 11.3 Intel Haswell Linux Verification

After testing out Mesa 11.3, I also did a run when using the drm-next-4.7 code for the Intel DRM to see if moving to there from Linux 4.4 (the stock Ubuntu 16.04 LTS kernel) would do any good, but it didn't either. In fact, with Linux 4.7 there were now two Linux OpenGL games proving to be unstable on Haswell: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and The Talos Principle.
Mesa 11.3 Intel Haswell Linux Verification

Visit OpenBenchmarking.org if you want a look at the largely unchanged data.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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