Intel OpenGL/Vulkan Performance Edging Slightly Higher With Mesa 18.0

Yesterday I posted some initial benchmarks of Mesa 18.0 on RADV/RadeonSI drivers for AMD GPUs now that feature development is over for this next quarterly installment of Mesa 3D. On the Radeon side there were mostly performance improvements to note with the RADV Vulkan driver, but what about on the Intel side? Today are benchmarks of the Intel i965 OpenGL and ANV Vulkan drivers compared to earlier Mesa releases for seeing how the Intel (U)HD Graphics performance has changed on the Linux desktop.

These Mesa 18.0 release candidate benchmarks are with the Core i7 8700K "Coffee Lake" system sporting current-generation UHD Graphics 630, which end up being nearly identical to Kabylake HD Graphics 630. Tests were done on Ubuntu 17.10 while using the Linux 4.15 kernel and GNOME Shell on the X.Org Server.

The Mesa releases compared were Mesa 17.2.4 (the stock Mesa environment on 17.10 Artful), Mesa 17.3.2 via the Padoka Stable PPA, and finally Mesa 18.0.0 Release Candidate 3 as of this week. A variety of OpenGL and Vulkan Linux games and other synthetic benchmarks were run via the Phoronix Test Suite for seeing how the Intel driver performance changes with Mesa 18.0, which will be released as stable within the next few weeks.