Intel Haswell HD Graphics 4400 Are Great On Linux

At Phoronix we have delivered a ton of Intel Haswell coverage and when it comes to the much-improved graphics capabilities on these latest-generation processors we have tested the HD Graphics 4600 that's commonly found on the Core i5/i7 desktop CPUs and the high-end Iris Pro 5200 graphics found on a few processors. For low-end Intel Core i3 "Haswell" CPUs there is also the HD Graphics 4400 model, which is what we're testing today. The Intel HD Graphics 4400 comparison is being compared on Ubuntu Linux to a variety of other Intel Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell graphics cores.

In preparation for the daily and per-commit benchmarking of Mesa, I purchased an Intel Core i3 4130 "Haswell" processor. I'll feature a review of the Intel Core i3 4130 CPU on its own under Linux in the coming days while today I'm focusing just on the HD Graphics 4400 performance. The Intel Core i3 4130 is a dual-core processor with Hyper Threading that runs at 3.4GHz without any Turbo Boost. The i3-4130 was released in September and features 3MB of Smart Cache, and has a TDP of 54 Watts. The Core i3 4130 also shares other common Haswell features like being fabbed at a 22nm process, SSE 4.2 and AVX2 instruction set extensions, etc.

The Intel HD Graphics 4400 core has a base frequency of 350MHz and a maximum frequency of 1.15GHz. The HD Graphics 4400 can drive up to three displays simultaneously permitting the used motherboard has enough connections. For the initial HD Graphics 4400 Linux benchmarks, the Core i3 4130 was compared to various other Intel graphics solutions on Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell generations hardware. The graphics processors being tested today include:

- Intel Core i3 2120 - Sandy Bridge - HD Graphics 2000
- Intel Core i5 3470 - Ivy Bridge - HD Graphics 2500
- Intel Core i5 2500K - Sandy Bridge - HD Graphics 3000
- Intel Core i7 3770K - Ivy Bridge - HD Graphics 4000
- Intel Core i3 4130 - Haswell - HD Graphics 4400
- Intel Core i7 4770K - Haswell - HD Graphics 4600

The motherboards had to be switched out between the Haswell and Sandy/Ivy Bridge processors but the rest of the components remained the same with an OCZ Vertex 3 SSD and 16GB of RAM. The software stack was comprised of Ubuntu 13.10 64-bit with the Linux 3.11 kernel, Mesa 9.2.0, xf86-video-intel 2.21.14, X.Org Server 1.14.2.901, and GCC 4.8.