Test Driving The New Intel Haswell Linux Performance Patch

Hitting the Intel DRM tree this week was the much anticipated Haswell performance patch that was previously talked up by LunarG for benefiting Valve's OpenGL games on Linux. I've ran a few quick benchmarks today of the new Linux kernel code.

For this quick on-the-spot comparison I ran some benchmarks of Linux 3.19-rc3 compared to the drm-intel nightly kernel state that is Linux 3.19 plus the Intel DRM kernel driver work under development that will ultimately be merged for Linux 3.20. This latest drm-intel code contains the anticipated Haswell specific performance patch.

Tests were done on the same Intel Core i7 4790K Haswell system with HD Graphics 4600 that was used for the recent Intel Windows vs. Linux benchmarking so besides showing the new kernel numbers there is also the Windows reference figures.
Just a few quick tests were done today given the short notice of the patch materializing, but from the initial numbers, it seems the performance improvements aren't actually widespread with some common Linux OpenGL tests seeing no change in performance.

All of the initial test data can be found via the results on OpenBenchmarking.org. I'll run some tests on some other OpenGL workloads -- including Valve's Linux games on Steam -- in the near future along with other Haswell hardware looking for performance improvements.