Intel Gallium3D Driver Gets HiZ, Other Changes

The "ILO" Gallium3D driver that supports modern generations of Intel HD Graphics now has support for the performance-boosting HiZ and has seen other changes in the newest Mesa Git activity.

The ILO driver continues to be an unofficial implementation of Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver code and based upon their official classic DRI driver. ILO is mostly the work of Chia-I Wu at the LunarG graphics consulting company. From time to time there's new ILO activity and today is one such occasion.

The commits led up to enabling ILO HiZ support to boost the performance of the Intel Gallium3D driver for Ivy Bridge and newer. Fast depth buffer clears hasn't yet been implemented and the HiZ support can be disabled for comparison/debugging purposes by setting the "ILO_DEBUG=nohiz" environment variable.

Other changes to the ILO Gallium3D driver can be found via the Mesa web Git interface. New benchmarks of the ILO Gallium3D driver against the i965 classic DRI driver will be forthcoming on Phoronix.