Intel 2D GLAMOR vs. UXA vs. SNA On Ubuntu 14.04

First up were the Qt4 tests via QGears2.

The highly-tuned SNA acceleration architecture that's enabled by default with xf86-video-intel 3.0 was performing the best. SNA is a big improvement over UXA, albeit the code-base is massively larger, and SNA continues to be refined by Chris Wilson at Intel's Open-Source Technology Center. Coming up last in all of the Qt tests was the GLAMOR acceleration back-end. The GPU-agnostic GLAMOR that uses OpenGL for 2D acceleration was no match for SNA.

With the x11perf micro-benchmarks, SNA continued to blow past the other Intel 2D acceleration methods. In most of the tests, UXA was in a distant second place followed by GLAMOR running at a snail's pace in comparison.