Intel Broadwell/Skylake Graphics Performance For Steam Linux Gaming

Insurgency was just released for Linux one week ago. To no surprise, the Core i7 5775C Broadwell is much faster than the two Skylake systems due to having the Iris Pro graphics. The i7-5775C led to certainly playable frame-rates at 1080p for this first person shooter while the i5-6500 and i5-6600K were coming under 50 FPS.

Team Fortress 2 was slightly less demanding than Insurgency on these Intel HD/Iris Graphics. The Core i7 5775C was very much playable for this popular, free-to-play Source Engine game while the Core i5 6600K was coming up just shy of a 60 FPS average.

The Intel open-source Linux graphics stack is great if you're just a desktop user, need video acceleration, or have other relatively basic needs, but unless you have a modern processor with Iris Graphics it really doesn't cut it for gaming. Even with the Iris Graphics, you're basically limited to OpenGL 3.3 games for now though within a few months the Mesa driver will hopefully be up to having OpenGL 4.2.

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