Linux 3.19, 3.20/4.0 Doesn't Do Much For Intel HD 5500 Performance

Yesterday I ran some benchmarks from the new Core i3 Broadwell NUC to see how the latest Mesa Git affects the OpenGL performance for the Core i3 5010U chip with HD Graphics 5500. Today I'm complementing that testing to see if the latest Linux kernel Git makes any difference for this low-end, low-power Broadwell chip.

With Saturday's tests comparing Mesa 10.4.2 on Ubuntu 15.04 against Mesa 10.6-devel Git, for this Sunday morning benchmarking fun I ran tests of Linux 3.17, 3.18, 3.19, and Linux 3.20/4.0 Git as of yesterday (though this last point isn't too interesting given the merge window is still open and the DRM changes haven't even yet landed). All tests were done on the same Intel NUC5i3RYH system.

Long story short is that with Linux 3.17 and newer there were no major OpenGL performance changes for the i3-5010U Broadwell with the range of Linux gaming/graphics tests used for this weekend benchmarking quickie. You can analyze all the results in full via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file or see how your own Linux system's graphics performance compares to this new NUC via installing the Phoronix Test Suite and running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1502154-DE-LINUXBROA52.