Intel Glamor Acceleration Compared To SNA, UXA

SNA also did the best when it came to the Cairo performance traces.

The GTK performance as measured by GtkPerf also varied between the three tested acceleration architectures.

Overall the best 2D performance for Intel Sandy Bridge hardware was found to be with SNA, the Sandy Bridge New Acceleration architecture. Meanwhile, Glamor did well in some of the tests and posed to be faster than UXA and SNA in select workloads, but for other 2D workloads its performance struggled. Glamor also wasn't stable with causing issues in some tests and other problems.

For enthusiasts fine with rebuilding their driver, running the xf86-video-intel driver build with "--enable-sna" can enable this new acceleration architecture. Originally when it was introduced last year, SNA was fairly buggy, but Chris Wilson has done a mighty fine job to work out most of the issues. Enthusiasts should be fine with running an SNA-enabled Intel driver for day-to-day use.