Running Ivy Bridge HD Graphics With Linux 3.16 + Mesa 10.3

Given our recent updated Sandy Bridge benchmarks on Linux, for those with Ivy Bridge processors curious how the HD Graphics are handling the latest Mesa and kernel, I have some updated benchmarks for you this Sunday.

For those wondering whether the newest Mesa and Linux kernel bring any performance advantages for Ivy Bridge class hardware, I ran some tests on the CompuLab Intense-PC. This system has the Core i7 3517UE CPU with HD Graphics 4000. Tests were done of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with all stable release updates, then tests on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the Oibaf PPA enabled, and lastly the Oibaf'ed setup when upgrading from the stock Linux 3.13 kernel to using the vanilla Linux 3.16 kernel. The Oibaf PPA tests were done just after Mesa 10.3 was branched so it's labeled Mesa 10.4-devel but still reflective of the Mesa 10.3 experience coming up with its stable release due out soon.

With Mesa 10.3/10.4 and the Linux 3.16 kernel there are some OpenGL performance improvements detected with the newer code for the Intel HD Graphics 4000 "Ivy Bridge" hardware, but the changes aren't exciting enough to warrant a multi-page featured article on Phoronix. So if you're an Intel Ivy Bridge user and want to see what the newest open-source Linux code can do, head on over to the OpenBenchmarking.org result file to see all of the data! You can also run your own side-by-side comparison performance test using the Phoronix Test Suite. Next week I'll also have Linux 3.17 kernel benchmarks for the Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge system.