Intel Ultrabook Performance Is Faster With Mesa 9.2

For those that were turned on by the recent Radeon Gallium3D performance improvements found in Mesa 9.2 but are Intel Linux graphics users rather than AMD, there's good news too. Here's some benchmarks showing off nice Intel OpenGL performance improvements found with Mesa 9.2 for an ASUS Ultrabook with HD 4000 "Ivy Bridge" graphics.

Back in April I posted some benchmarks showing Intel Ivy Bridge benchmarks doing better with Mesa 9.2 over Mesa 9.1. Those earlier tests were done from a CompuLab IntensePC with a Core i5 "Ivy Bridge" processor while today being benchmarked is a Core i3 3217U CPU with HD 4000 graphics and found in a lower-cost yet low-power ASUS Ultrabook. The performance with the very latest Mesa Git code remains very good news for Mesa 9.2/Mesa 10.0 being much faster than Mesa 9.1 stable.

It was also just yesterday I posted benchmarks highlighting the Intel Linux OpenGL driver now being better than Apple's driver on OS X 10.8. That benchmarking happened from a Mac Mini with Intel Sandy Bridge graphics. Included in that article were benchmarks from Ubuntu 13.04 stock (Mesa 9.1 + Linux 3.8) as well as the very latest Git code (Mesa 9.2 + Linux 3.10). Those previous-generation Intel graphics numbers show performance improvements too on this very latest code, making the Intel Linux driver times very exciting. With Intel's forthcoming Haswell launch, it's a great time to be an Intel Linux customer.

For today's Mesa 9.2 Ultrabook numbers, the hardware/software configuration details, system logs, and other information are available in full from OpenBenchmarking.org. The data is within the 1305160-UT-INTELULTR48 result file. Thanks to our collaborative automated testing platform plus the open-source Phoronix Test Suite cross-platform benchmarking software, it's also as easy as running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1305160-UT-INTELULTR48 for reproducing these Linux benchmark results and facilitating a fully-automated side-by-side comparison against your own software and hardware.
Similar to this week's Intel Linux vs. OS X benchmarks and last month's Core i5 Mesa 9.2 benchmarks, this new round of testing of Mesa 9.1 vs. 9.2 is showing some nice Linux gaming improvements in the yet-to-be-released Intel open-source driver.
In many cases there are measurable performance improvements but in other Linux games the performance hasn't been changed by much -- but at least I have yet to see any regressions.

See the rest of the results on OpenBenchmarking.org. Mesa 9.2 is also exciting for Intel Linux users because of improved OpenGL support, among other feature improvements and fixes. Mesa 9.2 will be officially released in the second half of the year.