Mesa 10.4 vs. 10.6-dev With An Intel Core i3 Broadwell NUC

With Mesa 10.5 recently having been branched and Mesa 10.6 now officially under development, I ran some quick comparison benchmarks today to see how the latest Mesa 10.4 stable series is comparing to Mesa 10.6-devel Git for an Intel Core i3 "Broadwell" NUC with HD Graphics 5500.

The Intel NUC5i3RYH Broadwell NUC I've been testing for the past week and so far it's going well. For some quick Saturday morning benchmarking I had an updated Ubuntu 15.04 development system with Mesa 10.4.2 that was then compared to the newest Mesa 10.6-devel Git packages via the Oibaf PPA. Ubuntu 15.04 at the moment is using the Linux 3.18 kernel; a separate article will have kernel/DRM benchmarks for this i3 NUC.

The long story short though is for this Intel Core i3 5010U Broadwell NUC with HD Graphics 5500, when comparing Mesa 10.4.2 to 10.6-devel from this week on Ubuntu 15.04 with the Linux 3.18 kernel, there were no exciting performance changes to note.

You can find all of the OpenGL test results via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.