Intel Haswell Gallium3D OpenGL Benchmarks

Last week support was committed to the mainline Mesa tree for Haswell Gallium3D support via the community-maintained "ILO" driver formerly known as i965g. In this article are the first public benchmarks of the Intel Haswell Gallium3D support code and the performance is compared to the classic i965 Mesa DRI driver that is officially developed by Intel for all modern HD Graphics hardware support.

The ILO Haswell Gallium3D support came by the driver's developer, Chia-I Wu, looking at the Intel Mesa driver in how the code-paths differed between Ivy Bridge and Haswell. The ILO Gallium3D driver supports Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, so Chia-I simply made the necessary changes to be able to support Haswell. The overall ILO Gallium3D support state though isn't really competitive and the driver isn't yet using any serious GLSL compiler. This Intel ILO Gallium3D driver is still pretty much a hobbyist toy project and isn't yet the level of capabilities as the Intel Mesa driver by far or even the i915 Gallium3D driver for older Intel IGPs.

The Intel Haswell Gallium3D support also only advertises OpenGL 2.1 compliance while the Intel Mesa driver is capable of OpenGL 3.1 and nearly OpenGL 3.2~3.3. Regardless, it should be interesting to see how the Gallium3D performance is for Haswell. Testing was done this past weekend as soon as the support was merged. The System76 Gazelle Professional was used for testing with its Core i7 4900MQ CPU with HD Graphics 4600. Xubuntu 13.10 x86_64 was in use with the Linux 3.11 kernel and the Intel Mesa and ILO drivers were tested from the same Mesa Git revision.