Intel Sandy Bridge Graphics Haven't Gotten Faster In Recent Years

This weekend I pulled out a Core i5 powered HP EliteBook that served as Intel's Software Development Vehicle for Sandy Bridge. I hadn't touched this laptop in a long time but decided to see how the current Linux + Mesa graphics stack on Ubuntu 16.10 compares to the older Linux distributions when Sandy Bridge hardware was more relevant.

Last year I had published Intel Sandy Bridge Linux Graphics Benchmarks Over The Past Three Years using this HP EliteBook. The hardware in this laptop hasn't changed at all since then and thanks to the Phoronix Test Suite we can fetch all of that old data, use the same exact versions of those older test profiles, and re-run the tests in the same exact manner with the same versions as done originally during that prior testing... But now we're using Ubuntu 16.10 and also testing the Linux/Mesa Git.

So we have fresh Intel Sandy Bridge results compared to Ubuntu Linux releases going back to Ubuntu 12.04.0 LTS. Fun look at how the Intel Linux graphics stack has evolved for Sandy over the past four and a half years on this Core i5 2520M notebook with HD Graphics 3000.



For the basic OpenArena game, the Ubuntu 16.10 / Mesa Git numbers put the HD Graphics only as fast as they were around Ubuntu 14.04 LTS before seeing some regressions in the stack.

Other tests show Sandy Bridge graphics simply haven't improved much in recent years.

See more of these Sandy Bridge graphics OpenGL results from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to Ubuntu 16.10 via this file on OpenBenchmarking.org.