Updated Intel Graphics Stack On Ubuntu 14.04 Has Some Slowdowns

For those curious about the impact of running Intel "Haswell" HD Graphics 4600 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and then pulling in the latest Mesa 10.3-devel code followed by the Linux 3.15 kernel, it's not entirely a happy story if you are looking to maximize your Intel Linux graphics performance capabilities.

Having done a clean install of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS this week on a Core i7 4770K system I figured I would do the usual graphics driver performance update of comparing Ubuntu 14.04 out-of-the-box (Linux 3.13 + Mesa 10.1) against pulling in the latest Oibaf PPA packages to have xf86-video-intel 2.99.911 DDX and the Mesa 10.3-devel Git master code (a big leap from Mesa 10.1.0). Lastly, with the updated Intel user-space graphics drivers I then updated kernel-space by moving to the Linux 3.15 kernel via the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA.

Usually making these package upgrades will result in better OpenGL performance for the constantly-improving open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack, but not always. In this article are results of the HD Graphics 4600 comparison in these three configurations. No hardware changes/settings were altered during testing, just swapping out the software components as noted above. All benchmarking was handled automatically by the Phoronix Test Suite.